A Death in Hogwarts
by EthyleneGlycol
Summary: A Hogwarts student is dead and it's up to Harry to find out why. Having nothing to go on and met only with the suspicion of his peers, he's forced into a temporary partnership with a mysterious Slytherin, promising him the information he needs to get his hands on before time runs out for him and everyone in the school.
1. I

**I**

The first sign something was wrong was the scream. It was the type of scream indicative of immediate danger and not something less serious, like an insult to the person or an especially large spider. A scream that echoes off the walls, reverberates through the room, cutting you to the bone. The Great Hall became eerily silent as hundreds of students and professors stopped eating and conversing to try and find the source of the scream. The person screamed again and broke down into sobs. Harry rose part of the way from his seat, propping himself up with his arms as he looked towards the Slytherin table. He looked towards the head table and noticed Professor Snape rushing down the end of the bench, McGonagall and Dumbledore not far behind him. They stopped about halfway down the table and Snape leaned over a crying girl who was sitting alone. His voice carried through the quiet hall.

"Ms. Parkinson? What happened?"

Her words were broken by sobs, preventing the rest of the hall from making anything out. The nodding and meaningful glances between professors indicated to Harry that they were at least able to understand her. Harry did manage to make out the sound of 'Malfoy' between her sobbing and wondered what could have possibly happened to Malfoy during dinner that would cause her to erupt in screams like that. In fact, Harry thought, scanning the Slytherin table, it didn't even look like Malfoy was at dinner. That was until Snape let out a curse that was heard by everyone and brought those whose attention wandered back to dinner to the spectacle transpiring before them.

"How did this happen, Ms. Parkinson?"

Her crying had died down into only the occasional whimper and she was able to speak coherently, at least at the start. The students in the Great Hall all seemed to collectively lean towards her, trying to catch every word.

"We were sitting here, eating dinner and talking about our classes when suddenly he…"

But she was unable to finish as she descended into another bout of tears. Her head slumped into her arms and her body shook with crying. Millicent Bulstrode patted her awkwardly while she cried. Snape turned his attention to the rest of the table.

"Can anybody else tell me what happened?"

"He's dead, sir," said a Slytherin male Harry didn't recognize.

"I can see that, Adams," Snape said. "I may not be a medical professional but I am still aware a living person should be breathing. What happened?"

Adams's voice acquired a wavering tone that had not been there previously.

"We were eating dinner and talking when all of a sudden he clutched his throat, his face turned red, and he slumped over."

Any further conversation between the group of Slytherins seated next to Draco Malfoy and the assembled professors was drowned out by the cacophony erupting in the Great Hall. Now that he was standing Harry could see Draco's blonde head on the table, his arms jutting out onto the table in front of him. Harry had seen enough people die to recognize the symptoms. Who would have killed Draco Malfoy? To do it at dinner seemed an act of desperation as well. Dumbledore's voice rang through the hall and cut off this train of thought.

"Prefects for Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, and Hufflepuff, please escort your students back to their respective dormitories. Slytherin, you are to remain seated," he finished speaking, but nobody moved. "Please do so immediately."

The only sound now was the scraping of benches and the shuffling of feet as the three houses went off in their respective directions. Harry snuck a glance at the Slytherins, who looked as if they were in a state of collective shock. Most of them were staring at their plates, hardly moving or making any noise. Crabbe and Goyle had their heads in their hands, the shaking of their shoulders betraying their emotional state. Pansy's tears flowed freely. Millicent Bulstrode was absentmindedly chewing on a large piece of bread. A group of first years held their wands in their hands looking as if they were prepared to fend off Malfoy's attacker if he or she came back for the rest of the house. Sprout and Flitwick had joined the other three professors next to Malfoy's body; Sprout was seated next to Pansy and appeared to be offering the semblance of comfort she would not be receiving from her own head of house. Snape's hands were on his hips, head tilted towards the ceiling as he started at the replica of the night sky above him, silent as Dumbledore and McGonagall conversed next to him. It was the first time Harry recalled Snape being upset in such a visible manner. Spite, anger, bitterness. That about summed up Snape's observed emotional range. This showing of helplessness was new to him.

"Come on, Harry," said Hermione, gently tugging on his arm. "We need to get back to the tower."

"Yeah, I'm coming."

A silence hung over them and the rest of the assembled Gryffindors as they slowly made their way to the common room. Nobody really knew what to say. Bodily injury was an accepted risk of being a Hogwarts student, they all knew that. But almost never was anyone seriously injured, much less lost their life. Harry had trouble processing the fact whoever perpetrated this act went after a student as prominent as Malfoy. It was unlikely they were going to get away with it. He was a prominent student of a prominent wizarding family. They risked the wrath of a family fortune and the society in which it existed coming together in bringing the perpetrator to justice. Not to mention the school and its charges being under the watchful eye of Albus Dumbledore. Old as he was, still one of the most brilliant and powerful wizards in Britain. Despite all this, Harry was reminded of somebody, nearly sixty years ago, who had been willing to attempt murder right under Dumbledore's nose and was were able to get away with it.

"Who do you think did it?" asked Ron, as they settled into a group of armchairs on the edge of the room.

"Voldemort," said Harry, instantly. "He was responsible for the last student to die at Hogwarts and I bet he killed this one too. Or killed on his orders. I hope this doesn't mean we have to kill another basilisk."

"Don't be ridiculous. I don't think even You-Know-Who would be able to just procure a new basilisk on a whim like that, much less setting it loose in the school," said Hermione.

Ron chimed in. "I don't think we have to look much further than the Slytherins themselves. So many of their parents are tied up in Death Eater stuff and with Malfoy's dad being at Azkaban, there's probably some sort of power struggle or a 'look at how great I am offing this unsuspecting student competition' going on with them all. Or maybe Malfoy bollocksed something up. You thought he was a Death Eater, didn't you Harry?"

"Yeah, maybe. But you all thought I was crazy."

Harry hid his frustration at the turn the conversation took. Of course they were now all agreeing with him that Malfoy was a Death Eater after he was murdered in the Great Hall under suspicious circumstances. It was a simple answer to a complex problem. Then again, Malfoy being a Death Eater was a simple answer for the complex reasons they so strongly disliked each other. Maybe Malfoy saw being a Death Eater as a straightforward solution for a complicated problem he was struggling with.

"It seems a little more likely now that he's dead," answered Ron. "Wouldn't you agree, Hermione?"

"I suppose so," she responded. "It'd seem kind of foolish to have him killed during dinner at Hogwarts otherwise."

"Bloody stupid if you ask me."

"It does seem reckless of him, doesn't it?" said Harry, as much to himself as to the others. "He's been operating so much in the shadows so far, why order such an overt action? It's only going to draw more attention to himself and his followers."

"Enough of them have school aged children too," said Ron, picking up the thread of Harry's though. "I don't know about you guys, but I don't know if I'd want to work for a nutter who kills my child at my first mistake."

"I wouldn't want to work for a madman in the first place," said Hermione. "Either way, I don't think we're going to find out who did it tonight so I'm going to do some homework. I've got a lot of reading to get done by the end of the week."

Her nose was buried in a large tome with a series of numbers on the front and she was lost to the world before she even finished her sentence. The normally boisterous common room was quiet around them, the voice of the gathered students barely rising above a murmur and the usual games of Exploding Snap and chess were nowhere to be found. There was a tension in the room normally present only after Harry went missing again or something significant happened in the world beyond the castle walls. If one of their number could be murdered in the Great Hall during dinner, of all times and places, who was to say they were still safe in the castle, especially as few of their families could rival the wealth and prestige of the Malfoys. Draco Malfoy was not a beloved friend of Gryffindor but he was still a Hogwarts' student, just like the rest of them.

Harry and Ron, neither particularly interested in doing schoolwork despite Hermione's occasional disapproving sniffs, discussed Malfoy deep into the night, speculating on possible suspects and methods as students shuffled up to bed. They quickly dismissed an outside suspect. Voldemort was a powerful wizard, equal only to Dumbledore, but they doubted he was ready to attempt a direct assault on Hogwarts at this point in time. Whatever protections Dumbledore had on the place wouldn't be worth the time and effort it would take him to get inside, they reasoned, meaning the list of potential suspects was narrowed to the teachers, students, and house elves residing within. They quickly dismissed the house elves. It wasn't Death Eater modus operandi to put their faith in another species like that, not to mention their powerful magic and fierce loyalty to Dumbledore and the school. That left the people inside.

"It has to be Snape," said Ron for what felt like the hundredth time.

"I'm telling you, Ron," Harry said, his voice rising in impatience, "Dumbledore trusts him and as much I disagree with him about some things, this point in particular, losing faith in him now doesn't do as any good. I don't believe Snape could murder one of his own students. He's a slimy, unlikable git. But he doesn't strike me as that sort of murderer. No, I'm betting it's one of the Slytherins. There's plenty of Death Eater connections on the outside there. I'm sure it wouldn't have been hard for their parents to persuade one of them to poison Malfoy to win favor with Voldemort."

"But how would they slip poison through to Hogwarts?"

"They could have brought it with them on the train and waited for their opportunity. We don't know what they do with the luggage after we got off the train. The elves might just magic it into student's dormitories without a second thought. Or even if they do a search it can't be hard to conceal a tiny of bottle of poison in one trunk and slip it through. I'm sure Voldemort could figure that out."

"Maybe mate. I just don't see the Slytherins having it in them. I think a teacher is more likely. If not Snape, maybe Slughorn. He's kind of a coward and maybe You-Know-Who promised to leave him alone if he offed Malfoy for him. We don't really know much about some of those other professors either. Sinistra, Vector, Babbage," he ticked them off on his fingers. "Could be any of them."

Harry laughed. "I don't think the Muggle Studies professor killed Malfoy, Ron."

Far from dissuading him, Ron latched onto the possibility of it being Professor Babbage. She was the perfect spy for Voldemort, whether willingly or not, he posited. Just the unassuming Muggle Studies professor. How could she possibly be in league with one who hoped to kill or enslave her subject matter? Harry had to admit, Ron became more and more convincing the more he talked. But looking at his watch and seeing how late it was, Ron could probably make a case for Mrs. Norris to be the murderer and Harry would have found it convincing. When Ron started making a case for Babbage being Umbrage in disguise Harry thought it best to cut Ron off in favor of them heading off to bed, picking up the discussion in the morning when their minds were fresh and the facts could be reexamined in the light of day. Before he could though they were interrupted by a third year Harry recognized but did not know by name.

"Harry?" said the boy. "Do you have a minute?"

Harry looked askance at Ron, who shrugged, apparently not knowing the student's name either.

"Sure. Sorry, but what's your name again?"

"John. I'm a second year," he said. "I was just wondering if you think it's safe."

"For you? Yeah. I reckon we don't have much to worry about."

The boy paused for a second, appearing to struggle with whether he should say something or not.

"You didn't kill Malfoy, did you?"

Harry's mouth was agape. Did people actually think he hated Malfoy enough to poison him over roasted chicken and potatoes? Harry hadn't considered the possibility yet, but if this third year, and a third year of his own house even, was asking this question, he hated to think of what was floating around the rest of the school, thinking back to the days following his name emerging from the Goblet of Fire. His enmity towards Malfoy was great, but he could not actually fathom murdering him. Maybe force him to live out his life as a ferret. Nothing approaching cold-blooded murder.

"No, John. I did not kill him. Draco and I never got along, but I would never kill somebody deliberately, not even my worst enemy."

John seemed satisfied with that answer and went off to bed. The two of them, now alone in the common room, sat in silence for a minute not quite sure what to say. Both made an attempt to speak before shaking their head and lapsing back into silence. After a few moments, Ron finally broke the silence.

"You didn't kill him, did you Harry?"

Harry bit back his anger at having to answer this question not once, but twice, and this time to his best friend.

"No, Ron. I didn't. I can barely get to class on time much less concoct a plan to murder the son of a one of the most prominent wizarding families in Britain at dinner, right under the headmaster's nose. A headmaster who is one of the most powerful wizards alive. A headmaster who I happen to meet with regularly."

Harry took a few deep breaths to calm his temper but Ron had a smile on his face. "Of course I don't think you did it mate. That's ridiculous. When's your next lesson with Dumbledore?"

"Friday. And I don't think he'll tell me much but I can maybe get something out of him."

"Alright," said Ron, who stood up and stretched. "I'm off to bed. You coming?"

"Why don't you go ahead? I'll be up in just a minute."

Ron said his goodnight and went off up the stairs. Harry looked into the fire, looking for answers that were not there. Harry knew Draco Malfoy was not a good person by any stretch of the imagination. He was a bigot, arrogant, and woefully ignorant about the world. He didn't deserve to die choking to death in his mashed potatoes, though. Nobody deserved that fate. Except maybe Voldemort. He was sending a message. He knew it. Harry hoped he could figure out what he was trying to say before it was too late.

* * *

"Potter? Do you have a minute?"

Harry whipped his head around, looking for the source of the voice. He had just left Defense Against the Dark Arts with the rest of the Gryffindors and avoided being carried away by the crowd only through great effort. He slipped out and waved Ron and Hermione on ahead as he turned to look the other way. He peered down the corridor and saw no one. Maybe it was somebody at the head of the crush of students that spoke, though he would have been surprised to hear them still refer to him as 'Potter'. Peeves could be floating around somewhere, prepared to dump a bucket of cold water on his head if he wandered too close. Taking one last look and not seeing anything he started to turn around and head for lunch before he heard the unfamiliar voice again.

"I'm back here, Potter."

A girl stepped around the corner. He vaguely recognized her as one of the non-Malfoy Slytherins, in their year, even without the green on her robes to clue him in. She was tall and blonde, as so many of the Slytherins seemed to be, and was surveying him through a pair of green eyes not dissimilar to his own. He couldn't quite remember her name though. She was one of the cadre of Slytherins who kept to themselves. He attempted to keep his immediate suspicions of her, as a member of Slytherin, to a minimum. It was only fair to give her a chance in these divided times. The way she was surveying him, somehow able to look at him imperiously down her nose despite being a few inches shorter than him, did not do her any favors.

"What do you want?" he asked. "Sorry, I don't quite recall your name. Tracey, is it?"

"No," she said, rolling her eyes. "It's Daphne. I know we've never really spoken before but I would still think you'd know who I am after all these years. I know who you are."

"Everyone knows who I am."

"True."

She didn't say anymore after that, seeming to challenge him to speak next. Harry didn't have anything he really wanted to say to her, but could admit he was curious as to why she would approach him like this, especially the day after the murder of one of her housemates.

"So...why exactly did you want to speak with me?"

She took out her wand and ignored the move Harry made towards his own. She cast _Muffilatio_ , which took him by surprise. He didn't think that spell had entered into general use.

"I need your help."

"What? Why do you need my help?" The incredulity on his face must have shown through because she continued a bit more brusquely.

"Malfoy is dead. Many of my housemates think I killed him. You and your friends are usually good at finding these kinds of things out and I know you're close to Dumbledore. Either you can help me or I'll have to take great pains to protect myself."

"Pain for whom?"

"I can promise you it won't be me."

Harry wasn't quite sure what else to say. It didn't make sense to him why the Slytherins would suspect one of their own. It had always seemed to him that they were united, especially in their support for Malfoy. Slytherin must be an even stranger place than he suspected if they were accusing one of their for murdering Malfoy in the first place, much less in the way it was conducted.

"You'll excuse me if I'm not quite sure why you need my help."

"The Greengrass family," so that was her surname. "Has never gotten along particularly well with the Malfoy clan. The Dark Lord complicates things. Without divulging too much detail to someone I don't trust to not go running to Dumbledore, let's just say the friction stemming from events beyond my control has led to this suspicion falling on me. I'm not in any immediate danger so I don't need you and you friends charging in wands blazing, but I need enough information to deflect suspicion."

"You didn't actually do it, did you?"

"No Potter, you can fucking bet I know better than to attempt to kill Malfoy under both the Dark Lord and Dumbledore's noses, even if he did deserve it."

Harry weighed his options. He still wasn't entirely sure she didn't do it as his baseline impulse was to trust Slytherins only about as far as he could throw them. Lucky for her, he could throw her a bit further than Malfoy's corpse so, relatively speaking, they were at least starting off on the right foot and it coincided nicely with his recent pledge to unite the school as best he could. If it turns out she murdered him in the end, at least he should have enough lead time that she won't get him too. He wondered what Dumbledore was going to say about this development.

"Sure, I'll help you. Do you know anything that would help get us started?"

"No, not really. Snape and Malfoy have been spending a bit more time together than they have in the past, but that's the only unusual thing recently."

"Isn't Snape spending any time with this students strange?"

Daphne looked slightly puzzled, "No. Doesn't McGonagall spend any time with you?"

"When she's giving us detention I suppose. But that's about it." The idea of spending time with a professor outside of class was foreign to him. "Are you saying Snape spends time with you guys outside of class and detention?"

"Yes."

Harry, accustomed to McGonagall's aloofness and Snape's sneering demeanor, was surprised by this. Even Hermione, bright as she was, rarely spent any time around the professors outside of class, even though Harry was willing to bet she'd love the opportunity to do so. Why did Snape, who greeted nearly all students, with the exception of some of his Slytherins and even they didn't fare much better, with varying degrees of dislike, spend time with any of his students outside of class much less Draco Malfoy? Of all the students who needed extra attention Malfoy did not strike him as one. But then again, he had ended up dead in a pile of roast chicken, so maybe there was more to him than meets the eye.

Daphne snapped her fingers in front of his face.

"When's your next meeting with Dumbledore?" she noticed Harry about to voice some form for protest to her ownership of this knowledge. "Yes Potter, most of the student body knows you spend some time with the Headmaster."

Harry sighed. "Friday."

"Good. Let's meet this weekend. Why don't you send me an owl Saturday morning with a time and place? I know I can't send anything to you without you divulging its contents to your friends, but I will have no such problem."

"That works for me."

"Good. I'll see you this weekend, Potter. I hope you have something good for me."

She turned on her heel and despite the length of the corridor, all it took was Harry glancing at his watch to check the time for her to disappear. Deliberately ignoring that piece of magic, he started down towards the Great Hall, realizing that Daphne was right, his friends always did want to know what was going on with him. Ron and Hermione would bombard him with questions even though he would be arriving only a few minutes after they did. For some reason, he found it very disconcerting that Daphne had pieced together that information that about him. He couldn't recall speaking with her even once through five plus years of school, so how she was able to provide such insight into his relationship with his friends was beyond him and very unsettling. It seemed he was dealing with somebody a bit more capable than the typical Hogwarts student.

* * *

"That's very interesting to hear, Harry. You say she approached you with no warning?"

"Yes, sir," said Harry. "I don't know if I'd spoken to her before yesterday."

Dumbledore stared intently at his interlaced fingers for a minute, perfectly still except for the movement of his lips half forming words. Harry had never seen the usually confident headmaster mull over anything the way he was right now. He worried that if Dumbledore was unsure of how to broach an issue, such as the matter with the prophecy at the end of last year, it would not be something to Harry's liking. Self-confident men, so accustomed to passing through life sure in their decision making and its consequences, did not bear the burden of doubt well. Before long, it seemed Dumbledore arrived at a decision, though Harry could see the disquiet in his features and the hesitation in his voice as he began speaking.

"Harry, what I'm about to tell you and subsequently ask of you must stay between the two of us. I must insist not even Mr. Weasley and Ms. Granger can know about this for the time being. Is that understood?"

"Yes, sir."

"Draco Malfoy was working for Voldemort. He was working on a way to kill me in order to assuage Lord Voldemort's disappointment at his father's mistakes. I have my doubts about how sincere his efforts were or whether he would have been capable of accomplishing his goal in the end, but I do believe this is why he was assassinated," Dumbledore continued, answering Harry's unasked question. "No, I do not know who or how he was killed. Perhaps this is where your new friend can help us."

"But she wants us to find out who killed him."

"Exactly. We can use that to our advantage. Even if she doesn't know who did kill Mr. Malfoy, she has insight into the inner workings of Slytherin house that the two of us, even with our considerable talents, lack."

Harry wasn't quite sure how to respond to the headmaster. He didn't fancy himself much of a spy and wasn't sure how to make his information gathering seem discrete as opposed to heavy handed and clumsy. Dumbledore seemed to believe in him, but sometimes he doubted Dumbledore had more than a passing grasp of the climate of the school and the entrenched enmity between houses. Maybe it was all well and good back in his day if he needed a favor from a Slytherin, but Harry didn't see this going over well for him. In fact, he was worried he would be the being taken advantage of and sticking his neck out for a Slytherin he didn't know. If it turned out it was somebody in the school who committed this crime, they might come after him next if he makes too much noise with Greengrass.

"I can certainly try, sir. It makes me a bit uneasy though."

"Of course it does, Harry. Anything worth doing should make us a bit uneasy. If everything was comfortable, why, we'd hardly see any reason to do anything at all."

Harry wasn't sure if he completely agreed with that as he thought about throwing himself into one of the plush armchairs in front of the fire in the common room instead of skulking around the school with a Slytherin trying to find information on the murder of one of their classmates, probably done on the command of a powerful dark wizard, and doing their best to avoid arousing any suspicious while doing so. It's not as though he could say, 'Thanks, but no thanks,' to the headmaster, so he agreed.

"Excellent. Now unfortunately, I do not have much for you to start with. I can confirm Mr. Malfoy was poisoned though. Professor Snape has told me he could find nothing missing from the school cupboard or his private stores, so we must operate under the assumption it was obtained from outside of the school. It is notoriously difficult to gain any useful information from the body of a poisoned person, but we are trying to determine all additional information about the potion that we can."

Harry didn't like how much Snape was involved in this. If he were involved in the murder of Malfoy or at least in the covering up, no information from him could be reliable. Even if the headmaster did trust him and Snape wasn't working directly for Voldemort, he could be working to protect one of his own students or somebody close to him outside of the school. He was the head of house for a murdered student; he was surely under some pressure to mitigate the aftershock of the event. Dumbledore may be going along with his conclusions for expediency's sake as well. With all of the dangers and faced by the Hogwarts student body every year and the enemies he made in very high places, it was sometimes a wonder to Harry the headmaster was still around all of these years. Even the most intelligent men could be deliberately ignorant if it served their needs.

"Are we agreed then, Harry? I will continue my probe with Severus and pass what information I can along to you. You will see what you can gather from Miss Greengrass and your work with the Slytherins."

"Sounds good to me, Professor."

"Excellent," he said, looking at the clock and clapping his hands together. "The hour is not yet late, we can still fit in some of our normal lesson."

* * *

 **A/N:** Hello all! This is my first fic in many years. The idea for a story about Malfoy's death has been rolling around in my head for the better part of the last decade (as evidenced by the few chapters of a story I posted awhile ago) and I finally worked up the gumption to write it. I have a draft for the story written to completion already, so I should be getting a chapter up every week or two as time allows me to edit and revise. I hope you enjoyed it and look forward to more. Thanks for reading!


	2. II

**II**

The next few days proved to be a struggle for Harry. The death of Malfoy hung over the school like a stone about to drop on their heads, each person trying to be the one it didn't drop on. Hogwarts was abuzz with theories and rumors about what happened to Malfoy and how he met his untimely end. These ran the gambit from absurd, with mentions of aliens and an international conspiracy to obtain the Malfoy family's wealth, to the serious, with some well-reasoned cases against members of the student body. Harry, who in hindsight should not have been surprised but still managed to be so, was one of the leading suspects. His dislike for Malfoy had been serious enough to make some of these theories tossed around casually hit a bit too close to home. Few took it seriously, but there were enough whispers in the hallways when he passed, especially from students of in the lower years who came up through Hogwarts hearing stories of the strange goings on around Harry Potter, seeing little of his actual exploits, to view him with suspicion. The constant mutterings made him wonder if he would end up being reaching the end of his rope and being a murderer himself before the school year was out.

He was sitting down to a late breakfast on Saturday, exhausted after an early morning Quidditch practice in the unseasonably warm October weather, when the post owls first arrived. He was satisfied to see the owl he sent off early this morning among them, making its way over to Greengrass sitting at the Slytherin table across the Great Hall. He was slightly concerned that his instructions of "Go fly around for a bit" would not be understood by the bird, but his worry had been for naught. He caught her eye when she looked up from his brief note and caught her small nod before she turned back to her own breakfast. Early Sunday morning in the unused third floor corridor. He looked forward to visiting again without Fluffy standing guard. Continuing to watch her as she smoothly slipped the note into her robes and brush off the entreaties made by the girl he believed to be called Tracy Davies, he admitted she had a point about the letter. There's no way she would have been able to slip something like that to him at the Gryffindor table and it likely would have ended with a broken promise to Dumbledore and Ron or Hermione insisting on accompanying him and making the meeting less than fruitful.

"What are you looking at, mate?" said Ron as he took the seat next to him. He had insisted Ginny stay behind with him to practice. Judging by his upbeat mood, it went better than usual.

Harry shook his head, feigning a momentary daze to cover his tracks.

"Nothing. Just daydreaming there for a minute. Was Ginny able to put you through your paces?"

"She sure did," Ginny said as she took the seat across from Ron and cutting his response off as she did so. "He didn't do half bad though. Might be able to stop a few goals with people watching yet."

Ron's smug look faded with her last remark and was only restored after Harry took great pains to reassure him he was a great keeper and if he could stop half of Ginny's shots when they were one on one with no Bludgers, no chaser would stand a chance against him in a real match. It seemed to perk him back up this time though Harry couldn't help but sigh to himself. This year was already shaping up like last year. The pep talks and words of encouragement had been frequent, despite his hope he wouldn't have to work quite as hard to keep Ron's confidence from collapsing this season. Harry had to stop himself when his thoughts started drifting towards an article he read concerning the use of memory charms as performance enhancing spells and the ethical quandary of selectively removing Ron's memories of botched goaltending in order to benefit his confidence. At the very least, maybe he could persuaded Dumbledore to loan him his Pensieve for this purpose.

"Are you sure you're okay, Harry?" Hermione asked, looking at him closely. "You seem like you're a million miles away and you've been drumming the table non-stop the last minute."

"Just fidgeting," said Harry, dropping his napkin when he overcompensated for Hermione's attention by flinging himself back from the table.

Hermione looked like she wanted to say more but Ron intervened. "Oh let it go, Hermione," Ron said, taking a roll out of the basket in front of him. "I fidget all the time. How do you think I ended up with this hole in my sleeve?"

"And how I got this scar?" Harry added, pointing emphatically at his forehead.

Hermione laughed, but Harry caught her looking at him a oddly a few times during the rest of their meal. He would have to deflect her attention somehow. If he aroused her suspicions so early in the process it would only be a matter of time before she confronted him about it and despite everything he had been through the last five years he was still an atrocious liar. It was too bad Dumbledore asked him not to say anything to her, as he imagined her intelligence and attention to detail would be a great boon to their efforts to determine the killer. She might even have some insight into Greengrass due to the time she spent with her in Ancient Runes and Arithmancy. Hermione mentioned a time or two in the past there was not quite as much animosity between students in those upper level classes like there was in the larger ones. Whenever this subject came up he always wondered how much more he would have learned if it weren't for Snape's antagonism or Malfoy's belligerence. He pushed those thoughts aside as he doubted he would ever have the chance to find out. Draco's death didn't seem like a catalyst for uniting the students of Hogwarts into a cohesive whole.

* * *

Harry tromped back up the stairs none too quietly, his grunting almost as loud as his footsteps, frustration from another long night sitting outside of the Slytherin Common Room amounting to nothing. Harry would soon have to think of a better strategy for learning more about the secretive members of that house beyond sitting outside of the door and catching one of them in a particularly talkative mood. Ron was beside him not talking, barely able to move one foot in front of the other. Not surprising, seeing as how his snoring had cut their night prematurely short. Harry, despite his feigned anger at Ron, had been grateful. It was a perfect excuse to bring their vigil to an end.

"How many more times are we going to have to do this, Harry?" Ron asked as they approached the portrait of Fat Lady. "This doesn't seem to be a very effective method of gathering information. Maybe we rough one of the younger ones up a bit? When I was younger, Fred and George would…"

"No, Ron," Harry interjected. "We can't arouse suspicion. What do you think will happen if it turns out Harry Potter is sniffing around the dungeons?"

"I suppose you're right."

They finished their journey in silence, both ready to fall into bed after few too many nights out in a row. They gave the password to the Fat Lady, pushing past her, able to ignore her admonishments for being out too late without listening to them after many years of practice. Ron was already through the portrait hole and Harry was about to follow him before a yawn brought Harry up short, his down tilted head catching notice of something on the ground. He bent to pick it up, the portrait's objections falling on deaf ears, and held it up in the torchlight. It was a flower.

"What do you have there, Harry?" Ron said from the common room, sticking his head back through the portrait hole.

"A flower," he said, holding it closer to Ron's face. It was a purple color with an almost black sunburst shape in the middle of it. The petals were wilted and slightly crumpled, but they could both identify it without trouble. It was Ron who spoke first.

"Pansy."

* * *

"Well, what do you have for me, Potter?"

"Not a whole lot," he said, "Dumbledore is aware of your interest in the matter and thinks we can use that to our advantage."

"I wouldn't be too confident about being able to use _me_ for _your_ advantage, Potter," she said, crossing her arms. "This will be a mutually beneficial partnership at best. Don't think you'll be able to take advantage of me though. You need me more than I need you."

Harry knew she had a point. He could only do so much without direct access to Slytherin and knew if he lost her they would be flying blind, the only clue they had being a damaged flower found outside of the Gryffindor Common Room. His chances of recruiting another student, especially one as well-positioned to help as her, would be worse than zero. Despite her disinterested facade though he knew she came to him for a reason. No one else would be able to give her access to Dumbledore and his thinking better than he could and Harry assumed that was valuable to her, otherwise she could have gone after the Head Boy or Girl or one of the prefects from a house less predisposed towards up front suspicion of her and her house.

"Fair enough, Greengrass. Your position in Slytherin is an invaluable asset for us right now," he said, "but it's not much use unless you have information or insight to give."

She pondered for this for a second and Harry could see she knew he had a point. Despite her demeanor, she was in a difficult spot. If she was willing to come to him and by proxy, to Dumbledore, there must be more going on behind the scenes in Salazar's house then she was willing to let on. Truth be told, he needed something. Despite the hours of discussion with Dumbledore who, he assumed, received information from Snape, they had little idea where to start. The house was famous for guarding its secrets and it seemed to have some success even when it came to the sometimes omnipotent seeming Headmaster.

"Pansy has been receiving a lot of mail recently. Almost daily, in fact. She hasn't gotten anything that I can tell since Malfoy snuffed it."

"You think Parkinson has something to do with it? Weren't they together or whatever?"

She snorted. "Hardly. They kept up appearances because their families expected it of them, but the first chance after Hogwarts to get away from each other they would take in a heartbeat. They don't loathe each other, but they had nothing to say to each other when they were together. So do I think she had something to do with it? My instinct says no, but that certainly seems a bit suspicious, doesn't it?"

"It does, but that doesn't really give us much to go on," he refrained from asking whether Pansy ever received flowers. "You all receive a lot of mail from home so it's possible there's just something going on at home or elsewhere that needed frequent updates. I don't presume you know anything about what the content of those letters could be?"

"No, Potter. Parkinson and I did loathe each other and even though we were housemates there is one thing we do all have in common: secrecy, never share information that could be used against you. Probably has something to do with the generations of dark and otherwise questionable witches and wizards churned out by that house."

Harry was not comforted by her casual acceptance of this fact. Of course it was hard to blame her when the rest of the school, students and staff, seemed to casually accept this as well. He wondered if they could change the Sorting Hat to try and create more ideologically diverse houses. Perhaps instead of collecting all the students predisposed to being ambitious and conniving or headstrong and impulsive into their own houses where those traits feed off each other Hogwarts should split them up to allow those personality traits to rub off on each other and wear down the rough edges. Maybe if this policy were instituted centuries ago there'd be no Voldemort. Or Malfoy would still be alive. Or instead of standing across from Greengrass, discussing the murder of a fellow student over their mutual suspicion of each other, they would be discussing plans to visit Hogsmeade or to work on their transfiguration essays together. Hermione had known this since they were eleven. What witches and wizards possessed in magical power they lacked in open mindedness.

Harry pushed up his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "You people are insane, you know that?"

"That, Potter, I do not deny. But then again, do you share everything about yourself with those in your house? I bet there's a few things about you even Granger and Weasley don't know."

Harry opened his mouth to deny it but hesitated. They did not yet know about the prophecy, which, no matter how much Harry tried to ignore it, probably qualified as important. That had to be kept secret though didn't it? It's not like he didn't trust the two of them, but who knows what could happen if Ron needed ammunition in one his squabbles with the twins or his parents. Hermione, in her efforts to understand the words backwards and forwards might spill something to an authority figure, inadvertently alerting them to something more than coincidence linking Harry Potter and the Dark Lord. Harry didn't like to believe he lacked trust in his friends, but when it came down to it he knew there were certain situations where he could not have faith in them completely. When the fate of a society rested on keeping something secret he felt he was justified in keeping it that way. Ron protecting his pride. Hermione's quest for knowledge and understanding. He didn't like the small smile emerging on Greengrass's face as his mind turned over.

"So is that all you have for me? Pansy was receiving letters regularly?"

"Yes. That's it so far. My house is in mourning, Potter. I can't go around asking questions when everyone is still broken up over his loss." She sounded anything but sad.

"Completely devastated I'm sure."

"I'll do what I can, Potter. But remember, this is a two way street. Do you have any information for me?"

"Malfoy was poisoned. That much we can confirm so far."

What he didn't say is that was about all they could confirm. Dumbledore and he hoped that would be enough to keep her interested until they were progressed with their investigation and had more to divulge, real or misleading.

"Is that it?"

"Yes. It was only a few days ago after all and as you say, I am also in mourning."

Daphne scoffed.

"Whatever you say, Potter," she checked her watch. "I better get moving before somebody stumbles on us. Same time same place next Saturday? Hopefully you'll have a little more for me then."

"Count on it, Greengrass."

She walked away without another word. It sometimes baffled Harry's mind that only a six short years ago he was an unwanted resident of the Dursley's household, trying to get by day to day escaping notice from his peers and the excuse for the people he called family. Now here he was in the corridor of a millennia old castle, able to do magic, and discussing the murder of a fellow classmate with another classmate who may or may not wish to do him harm all because he needed the information to aid his objective in saving the magical world as they knew it. Harry Potter, the Dursley's charity case, in charge of saving the world. Imagine that. If only the Dursleys could see him now.

 **A/N:** I know this is a short chapter but it just made sense to end it here. Never fear, the next one is on its way in the next week or so. Hope you've enjoyed it so far!


	3. III

**III**

"When's your next meeting with Dumbledore," asked Hermione, nudging Ron aside as she leaned closer to Harry. "Do you have any new information for him? Or he for you?"

It was now Wednesday and the state of affairs was unchanged in the few days that had passed following his first meeting with Greengrass. The school's atmosphere and routine was on its way to regaining a sense of normalcy for everyone but the Slytherins who, despite being where they were supposed to be when they were supposed to be, still lacked their normal attitude, retreating amongst themselves. It was hard for many students, especially those most belittled by members of that house, not to take some joy in this fact despite it being a direct result of the untimely death of one of their peers. Even with this guilt there were not many gestures of sympathy and outreach being made. The Slytherins remained as isolated as ever.

Harry kept an eye on Pansy during mealtimes, watching for any suspicious looking post owls flying in her direction. He even spent far more time in the Owlery than was normal for any person in complete command of their faculties had any business spending but his search, thus far, came up empty. Of course, now with Malfoy dead there might not be any more owls to keep an eye out for. At the very least, with what Greengrass had said about the letters as well the flower Ron and he found earlier that week, he would at least wouldn't be empty handed the next time he saw Dumbledore. Short of abducting Pansy and making her talk, he knew they were still at square one. Working with Greengrass was the key. She could provide insight he never hoped to have and felt that behind her reticence she knew more than what she let on. The challenge would be in getting her to talk.

"No, nothing yet. I haven't the slightest clue where to begin either."

"Maybe I can poke around a bit?" she said, "I get along well enough with a few of the Slytherins in our year. Daphne Greengrass and Tracy Davies are in my Ancient Runes class."

Harry saw no reason why not and nodded in the affirmative. He doubted whether Hermione would be able to get any worthwhile information out of either of them but figured it wouldn't hurt to have her approach it from a different angle, even if she was as subtle as a ton of bricks to the face.

"Just play it cool, alright?"

She seemed offended by that remark and drew herself up haughtily.

"I'll have you know I'm very cool. In primary school I could talk my way out of trouble whenever I wished."

Ron snorted into his stew. "I don't know exactly what this primary school is but I doubt you talked yourself out of anything, Ms. 'Oh but we'll be expelled'."

"I'll have you know I was quite the troublemaker! Once I…"

Harry missed what exactly it was that made Hermione quite the troublemaker, tuning out the rest of their conversation and looking over at the Slytherin table in hope inspiration would strike him or, failing that, catch Parkinson putting something in another Death Eater's child's drink. Everybody seemed to be there. Nott was now flanked by Crabbe and Goyle, Zabini, was sitting with Millicent Bulstrode and Tracy Davies, Pansy was next to them but with plenty of space between them, a removed from the larger group. She looked morose, swirling her food around on her plate instead of eating any of it. There were dark circles under her eyes and her usually dull blonde hair seemed less lustrous, absorbing the light that came into contact with it and hanging around her face like a half shut curtain. He almost felt bad for her if he looked past the six years of constant taunts and insults towards Hermione, Ron, himself and the rest of the Gryffindors, not to mention being the leading suspect as to the cause of what he assumed was making her sad. Despite all of her faults she was still only a teenager. Teenagers shouldn't have to deal with their close friends and family cut down by assailants, known and unknown, and remembering how he felt about Sirius's death gave him the means to give Pansy the benefit of the doubt and mourn with her for a moment. He hoped she would have the same courtesy if he were ever to lose one of his friends in this conflict. He did his best to put those thoughts to the side until they were able to confirm whether Pansy was responsible.

He caught Greengrass's eye as his gaze made its way down the Slytherin table. She was reaching for a roll and seemed surprised when she noticed Harry's looking, as if she had never caught a Gryffindor staring at their table before. Surprising both her and himself, he winked at her. He didn't know what he was accomplishing with that, but he was in unchartered territory as it was. Her face was a mask but she looked away and Harry felt as if he scored a point. The Slytherins weren't so tough after all. They could play those games amongst themselves, having to keep their loyalty to Voldemort a secret but not so secret other followers couldn't identify each other, but when it came to the school at large they were the same as the rest of them. Clueless teenagers trying to navigate their world as best they could. Just more arrogant.

"See anything interesting over there, mate? You've been looking over at the Slytherin table for a while now."

"Only suspects. We haven't really narrowed it down yet, just that it's probably someone in the house. Who else would be able to get so close to Malfoy?"

"I'm sure the Slytherins don't only talk to Slytherins, Harry. You don't only talk to Gryffindors, do you?" Hermione chimed in.

"Have you ever seen a Slytherin talk to a member of another house other than to throw an insult or cast aspersions on their general competence as a human being?" Harry saw Hermione start to say something and interjected. "That wasn't in your Ancient Runes class."

"I'm sure there are others too," she said, somewhat sheepishly.

"Yeah, maybe one of the first years they haven't had a chance to curse yet."

"Ron!" admonished Hermione. "I'm sure they don't curse the first years."

"Would it really surprise you that much?" Harry said, glancing at her over his glasses.

She fell silent. There was no real proof that the older students did that to the first years, but there were persistent rumors and the fact that none of them would be surprised if they did spoke volumes. It wouldn't be that much of a stretch that the most insular house used a bit of intimidation to enforce the behavior of the first years and encourage them to toe the house's behavioral line from day one. All the houses had some form of hazing to introduce the new students to Hogwarts and their housemates. Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw's were mostly all in good fun. Just a few harmless jokes and tricks to warm them up, have some fun with them, but mainly to welcome them to the castle they'd spend the next seven years of their lives. It was also a good introduction to magic for the Muggleborns. Give them a taste of what they'll learn and what they'll be able to do in only a few year's time. When Harry tried to picture a "Welcome to Hogwarts" from the Slytherins all he could visualize was a group of frowning seventh years standing over cowering first years at the end of a dark corridor, fingering their wands. No wonder they were always one of two stripes, arrogant and outspoken or quiet and insular. He didn't know if that was true, but for some reason he couldn't see the Slytherins have a bit of harmless fun with the new members of the house.

"You done?" Ron's voice shook brought him out of his thoughts. "We're going to be late for Transfiguration if we don't hurry."

Harry nodded in the affirmative and grabbed his bag, following Ron and Hermione out of the Great Hall. He glanced at the Slytherin table one last time and noticed Greengrass was watching them again.

* * *

"Come in, Harry. We have much to discuss tonight."

Harry sat down in the chair across from the Headmaster's desk and looked at his feet. He did not want to meet Dumbledore's eyes. With the only limited knowledge he acquired since the last time they spoke it felt as though he would disappoint the venerable headmaster.

"Professor, before we start I just want to say…"  
"No need, Harry," he said, raising his hand. "I assume you wish to tell me you have yet to acquire information of any real value and want to apologize for it?"

Harry wasn't surprised the headmaster was able to preempt what he wanted to say. It wasn't the first time Dumbledore had anticipated what he was going to say before he was going to say it. As he got older he grew more suspicious of Dumbledore's ability to do so. Age and experience surely helped Dumbledore in reading these situations but he was far too accurate far too often to get by on that alone. Sometimes Harry regretted not dedicating himself more to Occlumency. He trusted the headmaster, but it wasn't Dumbledore he needed to keep out.

"Never fear, Harry," Dumbledore continued after Harry murmured his assent to Dumbledore's guess. "I did not expect you to have much. Slytherin house is a difficult one to crack. Even our dear friend Phineas Nigellus would admit to difficulty with those students during his time. Salazar Slytherin was a great wizard, but his…" he seemed to want to choose his words carefully. "...fanaticism for certain ideologies and his somewhat unconventional approach to both the education of magical children as well as the society they resided in writ large, was extreme, even for their time. We have not yet been able to shake the divisions bred by him and his disciples all those years ago. The Sorting Hat has proven most uncooperative in this matter," he gave the hat a sideways glance. "Even so, we will still need a way to crack our current conundrum. Any ideas?"

Harry looked away from the headmaster and surveyed the variety of instruments in the office. Truth be told he had not spent much time thinking about the best way to get past Greengrass's defensiveness and approach Slytherin from that route. His usual approach of rushing in blind and working his way through on a combination of luck and moxie did not seem to be appropriate when dealing with a group of people as resistant to what he represented as they were to himself and a person. Making matters worse, their level of cunning was simply greater than anything he could hope to achieve. It was easy to work with Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs, they were the trusting sort. Ravenclaws too, once you convinced them you were worth dealing with. They Slytherins though. It's almost as if they didn't know how to work with other human beings.

"Trust. I need a way to establish trust."

Dumbledore clapped his hands together. He seemed exceedingly pleased by Harry's answer.

"Excellent! That's what I was thinking as well. Now, it's easy to say we need to get your acquaintance to trust you, but how should we go about establishing it?"

Harry knew nothing about Daphne Greengrass other than she was roughly the same age as him and possessed blonde hair, blue eyes, and was moderately tall. That did not require an expert detective to observe, only somebody not in a coma. He had no idea what motivated her or would win her trust. Not even a general inkling of what a Slytherin would desire. Maybe Dumbledore would teach him Legilimency so he could skim it from her thoughts, but he didn't think Dumbledore would approve of this sort of approach. If Snape were headmaster and did not treat Harry as some sort of unpleasant side effect of life this idea would have some viability, but this thankfully, for more reasons than one, was not the situation.

"I honestly don't know, sir. I haven't spoken with her or with any Slytherin that much during my time here. I'm not sure what would win them over."

Dumbledore was silent for a moment, his piercing blue eyes looking at Harry over his steepled fingers. He seemed to be struggling with something, starting and stopping a sentence more than once before finding the words. Harry felt as though that was the wrong answer and Dumbledore was trying to correct him without bring down on Harry the full brunt of his flawed response. He looked out the window and queried Harry on a topic he never thought he'd have to think about again. Something so dreadful, so horrible, from his childhood he had no wish to speak about. Those memories were in the past and that is where they should have stayed until Dumbledore dredged them from the depths of his consciousness.

"I do not suppose you read any Shakespeare in primary school, did you, Harry?"

The very name filled Harry with dread. The 'You-Know-Who' of Muggle literature. "Romeo and Juliet, sir. I think it was the censored version though. I've never read the full version."

Dumbledore chuckled. "Yes, Muggles do seem most intent on protecting their children from the horrors adulthood don't they? And here we are with wizarding teenagers fighting our wars for us."

"What does Shakespeare have to do with the Slytherins?"

Dumbledore did not immediately respond, instead walking over to a bookshelf on the far side of the room, squatting down to open one of the doors. The bookcase was impressive in its size with shelves and doors of dark wood, finished with intricate detailing around the frame. He tapped his wand on the panel and muttered a few words before reaching inside to extract what seemed to be to Harry a normal looking book. One that was obviously Muggle-made, paper and machine printed. He handed the copy of Shakespeare's collected works to him.

"I keep these books out of sight, Harry, and I suggest you do the same. Not that I worry for persecution, but I'm sure you've noticed many of those in the upper echelons of our society hold a certain disdain for all things non-magical. It wouldn't do for the headmaster of Britain's largest wizarding school to be found with such questionable artifacts."

"Do you want me to read this, sir?"

"I highly encourage it, Harry. Muggles have a certain knack for understanding human nature that our society has not yet uncovered. I'm sure you know that Muggles have entire schools dedicated to the study of history, culture, and the nature of man. Despite the value of these pursuits, the insistence of those same people who force me to keep these books hidden are a weight on society by discouraging the pursuit of the same knowledge within our own world. Magic makes things simple for us and sometimes this ease is to our own detriment."

He pulled out his wand and conjured a stream of water and let it spray out onto the floor before animating a rug on the floor next to Harry to crawl over and mop it up. A blast of heat dried the rug and everything was as it never happened.

"A Muggle cannot conjure water, but can spill it. They cannot animate an object to clean it up for them but they will still wish to wipe it away. I even hear they have these ingenious inventions called paper towels. Absorbent paper. I tried to get the wizarding world to adopt pen and paper awhile back but was rebuffed. We are not skilled in the use of plants to produce our goods nor the manufacture of metal. Parchment and quills are made from animals. Most of our clothing is from those sources as well. We like to think we are masters of the world because we can create things with the wave of a wand, but the Muggles put us to shame in the way they have mastered the materials the earth provided to them."

Harry interjected before Dumbledore went on for too long. Modernizing the wizarding world would need to wait until Voldemort was dead and Voldemort's death would have to wait for a resolution to Malfoy's.

"Where are you going, sir?"

"Ah yes, excuse the ramblings of an old man, Mr. Potter. What I meant to say before my digression is that there is a line in one of Shakespeare's plays, _The Merchant of Venice_ , in which Shylock, a Jewish moneylender, says to a friend of his rival 'if you prick us, do we not bleed?' I do not know the extent of your grasp on European history, but the Jewish people are one that the rest of the peoples of Europe historically looked upon with disdain. Much as we do Muggles, or magical creatures, or an alumni of a certain house. Would you be surprised if I told you the division of Slytherin from the other three house is entrenched in our society beyond Hogwarts?"

"I suppose I wouldn't, sir."

"Of course not. Those divisions have reinforced themselves through the generations. If you spend seven years distrusting someone for their house, why are you suddenly going to change? But just like Shylock, if you strike at them with a cutting curse, will they not bleed? If you want to gain one's trust, should you not approach them as any other person?"

Harry felt like he knew where Dumbledore was going with this and was a step behind. He understood the point he was making about Shakespeare and people and treating everyone with respect. It's not as if anyone had told him to disregard the members of Slytherin, not even giving them a chance, though it did seem for dealing with hordes of young teenagers there was a suspicious lack of intervention in these negative relationships. The only lesson going into the forest with Hagrid taught you was to be afraid of the forest and the next time you wanted to get even with someone to make sure there were no teachers in the vicinity. Hagrid, detention, or the forest weren't going to solve this problem though.

"So you're saying I should try to get them to trust me as if they were any other student? What if they use that against me?"

Dumbledore looked him straight in the eye and Harry felt the little tingle from the headmaster's electric blue gaze that he had not felt for years.

"Let go of that fear, Harry. I am not saying to bare all. By all means, share only what you feel prudent. Do not fall in the trap of greeting everyone you meet with suspicion though. You might just find the Slytherins aren't so bad after all. Who knows, if you pursue this with genuine feeling you might end up with a new friend and if Harry Potter can make friends with a Slytherin, what's stopping everyone else?"

"I'll give it a try, sir."

"Of course you will, Harry," he looked at his watch. "Now it is late, but we can probably work on a new spell yet this evening. I thought of one which might turn out to be useful in the near future. Please take out your wand and face me."

Dumbledore vanished his desk and they faced each other, wands loosely at their sides. They had not yet moved onto full-fledged dueling because Dumbledore would make a fool of Harry, no matter how powerful he was and how many of the spells they practiced he mastered. There simply wasn't enough time to learn and grow enough to take down Voldemort face to face, but Harry wanted to take advantage of Dumbledore's depth of knowledge and experience while it was readily available to him. Regular meetings had been taking place since the beginning of term, with Dumbledore sharing stories and experience and knowledge that may help Harry in the fight to come, and offering, after some insistence on Harry's part, to teach him magic not usually found in the school's curriculum. They spent hours talking over what the headmaster knew of Voldemort: his past, inclinations, studies, and whatever else came to mind.

Harry enjoyed those meetings and knew they were crucial to his survival, Dumbledore emphasizing those lessons in particular, but it was the practical magic he enjoyed the most. Spells to alter your appearance, make you hard to detect, and simple battlefield transfiguration were things they had dabbled in. Dumbledore often reiterated that when attacking your opponent itself, the variety of spell you used was of little matter. There were half a dozen different forms of disarming charms, a dozen ways to cut someone, and wide variety of ways to bludgeon your opponent with concussive force. These spells didn't matter. If you mastered one from each category and knew when to employ it that was enough. What separated the true duelists from the battering rams was the ability to improvise and be creative. Transfiguration, trickery, and subtlety were often what won a duel, not knowing the seven different ways to stun your opponent. This is what Dumbledore wanted Harry to master. He told him he had no worry about this ability to stun, bludgeon, cut, or disarm potential opponents, so it was these other forms of magic they practiced. Spells to disorient, animate objects, and spells like a particularly tricky one Harry spent a few weeks mastering that made the unfortunate recipient see everything in an ever shifting kaleidoscope of colors, were their normal fare. Tonight's spell would, when cast successfully, project a mirror image of the caster. After extensive practice Harry managed to project himself but failed in keeping it up while casting a stunning spell at the headmaster. Dumbledore assured him this was a good start and they said their goodbyes.

* * *

Harry and Daphne were in the same empty classroom as last week for their now semi-regularly scheduled meeting, the invitation sent through a series of meaningful looks and nods over breakfast. The atmosphere between the two was as tense as ever, a growing familiarity with each other's presence not enough to develop a burgeoning camaraderie or rapport. Harry could picture them circling each other with their wands out, refusing to give an inch in the conversation. More often than he felt comfortable noticing, he caught himself looking at the way she twirled her blonde hair around her finger when she was thinking, or how she stared straight up at the ceiling with her bright blue eyes when she was frustrated. How slender and strong her legs were under beneath the hem of the robe he was almost positive she deliberately shortened. How she thundered at him when his attention wandered.

"...What?" Harry said, shaking his head.

"I said, do you have any more information for me?"

He did not of course. He was hoping she had something for him that would lead him to more information which he could then in turn share with her. Without access to the Slytherins he had nothing and it's not like he and Dumbledore were about to start abducting Slytherins in their sleep to interrogate them and then memory charm so they were none the wiser. No, he was going to have to do this the old fashioned way, like the old gumshoe American detectives he read about in the few books he was able to sneak home from the school library when he was younger. He often dreamed of being as smart and suave as these denizens of the urban American underbelly, getting by on a combination of wit and intelligence to solve crimes and win the girl. This was his chance. Except he didn't see Daphne as the damsel in distress, which were his favorite. She was more the femme fatale, using him as much as he was using her. He had no information about Malfoy's demise but had a sneaking suspicion she did. He decided there wasn't much harm in initiating the plan Dumbledore and he had developed a rough outline of in their previous meeting.

"I spent the first eleven years of my life in a closet under the stairs."

Her eyes grew wide and she was at a momentary loss for words, struggling to come up with an appropriate response to his statement. He wasn't sure what made him lead with this particular fact. He didn't even consider it that remarkable. The Weasleys and Hermione had never really said anything about it and even the Hogwarts staff, especially Dumbledore and McGonagall, surely had some inkling of it after dozens of letters addressed to "The Cupboard Under the Stairs" and never said anything. At this point in his life he accepted it as part of his past and tried not to dwell too much on the hours spent in the dark when Uncle Vernon removed the light bulb or the nights as a child where he would curl into a tight ball, eyes dripping with tears and body with sweat, trying to fend off the terror of another nightmare without awaking his aunt and uncle. Maybe that's why it seemed innocuous to him and those around him at this point he had no problem sharing it. Not like the prophecy or his connection with Voldemort. This was removed from the magical world. A part of Muggle Harry and not Wizard Harry.

"You what?"

"Cupboard under the stairs. Like a broom closet. That was where I slept. And ate. And spent most of my time when I wasn't in school or doing chores. It was okay. Dark. Quiet except for when they banged on the door or jumped on the stairs. Mostly I was happy when they left me alone."

The line of Greengrass's mouth lost its hard edge.

"Why are you telling me this?"

"I'm not sure really," he actually wasn't, or at least why he shared that particular piece of information. Dumbledore said to gain her trust, not bare his soul. "It felt appropriate. If we're going to work together to discover the secret to the death of one of our fellow students it seems like we should get to know each other a little better. Besides," and he actually was starting to get a little uncomfortable at this point, "I haven't ever really spoken to anyone about this before. Ron, Hermione, and all the professors know but have never broached the subject with me. I figured maybe it was normal. I don't suppose people in the wizarding world house their children in dark rooms until they receive their Hogwarts letter?"

"No, they don't. Well, I'm sure some do, but not in Britain anymore. I know there's a group out in Siberia that keeps their children isolated until they gain their powers but they banned that here centuries ago. Of course there are rumors about some Pureblood families..." she continued to speak, not really to him anymore. Maybe this Slytherin had a heart after all. "...anyway, what does this have to do with Malfoy?"

"Nothing I suppose. I don't really have much new information for you. I was hoping you had something about Parkinson for me I could use. Neither Dumbledore nor I are quite sure where to go from here. Not even Snape, with what insight he has to the dealings of his students, is much help now. We're going to need more from you, Greengrass. I know a house elf who could maybe assist, keep an eye on the trash and if there's anything unusual showing up in the dormitories or empty classrooms or anything, but he'll probably only make limited contributions."

"A house elf? I thought you were raised by Muggles."

"He works here at Hogwarts. I freed him from the Malfoys back in my second year."

"Dobby?"

"Yeah, he's the one."

She laughed. It was an actual, full laugh. Bright and cheery. Not like her usual scornful snickering and snorting.

"Malfoy spent that summer complaining to us about how he his father was tricked into giving up his house elf. If you were the cause of it I'm sure Lucius Malfoy made up some lame excuse about the service of the Dark Lord or executing him for disobedience or something."

"You see Malfoy over the summers?"

"No. He wrote us all though, constantly. Always had. He says it's because he needs to keep in contact with us all as the most influential member of Slytherin, but I think he's just lonely. The Malfoy estate is very isolated and they are not fond of visitors. The Malfoys like to bandy about their connections, but it's mostly based on wealth and reputation, as I'm not aware of any actual friends."

Harry had an idea. If Greengrass still had those letters it may give them some clue as to what precipitated this attack. If the Malfoy he knew was anything like the one writing those letters he would not have had a problem sharing information unless it diminished his family's status. There might be some clue in those writings: a jealous follower of the Dark Lord, a Ministry official after the Malfoys, somebody trying to blackmail them and using the current unrest of Wizarding Britain as a cover for foul deeds. These letters could be the first real insight into who was after Malfoy.

"I don't suppose you have those letters still?"

She eyed him suspiciously. "And what if I do?"

Harry sighed impatiently. "I have no interest in learning the lurid details of your life, Greengrass. I just think there might be some relevant details in there. The Malfoy I knew loved to brag about his family and wealth and what have you, and I have no doubt he loved running his mouth around the lot of you to try and impress you…"

"Fair enough. Yes, I do have the letters still. My father always said to save everything because you never know when it will be useful."

"That's very…" he wanted to say that was very 'Slytherin' of her, but after thinking about it for a second, he could rationalize why it would be important to save personal correspondence in the sort of society they ran in. You never knew when it could be useful. "...smart of you."

"You're learning. You keep this up we might even be able to find who killed Malfoy. I can send a letter to my father after we're done here. He'll be happy to provide them when I tell them what they're for. He's very interested in finding the culprit so we can clear our name."

Harry's reply was interrupted by the sound of the door shutting behind them. Moving as fast as he had seen some of the Aurors move, Greengrass's wand was out and she ran over to the door, wrenching it open and looking first right then left. She continued looking down either end of the hallway, like a predator scenting the air, knowing if she stayed out there long enough it was only a matter of time before its prey became nervous and made a break for it. Sure enough, after about ten seconds of staring out past the door she stepped fully into the passageway, brought her wand up and leveled it out, shooting a bolt of pale blue light out of the end of her wand without saying a word. Even though Harry knew whatever just happened was not ideal, he could not help but be impressed with the strength of her spell, something Harry knew he would not be able to achieve when casting silently.

"What was it?" he asked, only able to see Greengrass's, albeit appealing, backside as she continued to lean around the doorframe.

"Some dumb kid. I think it might have been a Slytherin. One minute, I think the coast is clear. Let's see what he saw."

She stepped outside and the door shut quietly behind her leaving Harry alone with his uneasy thoughts. She just stunned a younger student for looking in on them. Unprovoked. It's not as if they would have heard anything important. At the worst, there would be rumors floating around the school of Greengrass and he involved in a clandestine relationship. He could handle that, especially if it would force more contact between himself and the Slytherins. Maybe he could feign a dislike with the other houses or even an interest in Voldemort and find a way to get one of them to spill the beans about Malfoy. If Greengrass was any indication that would be easier said than done. Not only an interloper, but a Gryffindor, frequent Voldemort and blood purity combatant, interloper. Scratch that. The kid would probably only need a few chocolate frog cards or Galleons to stay quiet.

The door opened and a limp figure came floating in at waist level, Greengrass close behind. The student was a young male who Harry didn't recognize, blonde and thin, a second year at most. He was wearing Muggle clothing, something most of the younger students did on the weekends. There must have been a shift in Wizarding fashion over the last few years as Harry couldn't recall the students in his year wearing Muggle clothing that often and for this cohort of students even the purebloods were attiring themselves in jeans and sweaters. If you can't beat it, appropriate it. Harry was just happy that at least they could agree it was generally superior to the robes and cloaks magical folk favored. She shut the door behind her and muttered a spell under her breath before walking him up. The boy took a second to come to and then looked around frantically, thrashing on the cold stone floor.

"I can't see!"

Harry was starting to worry that Greengrass did some kind of irreversible damage to him.

"What'd you do to that kid, Greengrass?"

She came over to the side of the room he was on, coming to stand closer to him than she ever had before. She wore a very earthy perfume, much less feminine than he was expecting. She leaned close, obviously not wanting to be overheard.

"A temporary blindness spell. I didn't want him to see who we were. He'll be fine in a few minutes though," she pointed her wand at him. "I'd also thank you to not say my name again. We might still be able to get out of this without him knowing what he stumbled on."

"Stumbled on? I'm sure he just stepped into the room for a second on accident," he whispered back. "I doubt he heard anything incriminating."

"Incriminating? You have no idea," she turned towards the boy who had quit writhing on the floor and was instead sniffling, blinking his eyes wide in an apparent attempt to reintroduce sight. "You think that if you were him and stumbled into an out of the way room where Harry Potter and Daphne Greengrass were discussing Draco Malfoy you wouldn't find that a little suspicious?"

"Well, he's in your house. Couldn't we just give him a few Galleons and say you'll be keeping a close eye on him and send him on his way? I can't imagine a young student like that would do us much harm after a not so subtle suggestion."

Greengrass rolled her eyes. "First off, a young student is exactly the kind of person who would go blabbing on about that, even after a threat. They have more excitement than sense and would love to relate the time they ran into Potter and Greengrass hidden away to anybody willing to listen. Secondly, you don't know who that is, do you?"

Harry answered in the negative.

"That's Nott's younger brother, Gregory, Potter. You don't think he might mention it to his older brother, Theodore, who might mention it to their 'secret, but not really that secret' Death Eater father, Lawrence, who recently escaped from Azkaban?" Harry looked at her with furrowed brows but didn't say anything. "I didn't think so. I think we're going to have to _Obliviate_ him."

She turned towards Nott and Harry sprang into action, casting an _Expelliarmus_ before she had a chance to react and snatching her wand out of thin air. Greengrass did have a point about limiting the information he could disseminate to people they may not want knowing about their meetings, so he stunned the boy so he would be unaware of anything further transpiring in the room before they decided what to do with him. Greengrass quickly regained herself and dove straight at him, trying to wrestle the wand out of his hand. She tackled him around the waist with a surprising about of force for somebody as slender as her both they and their wands went flying, rolling around in a tangled heap before realizing the wands were not between them and scrambling after them. They managed to grab hold of one and stood facing each other, each pointing a wand at the other's chest. They were panting from the exertion but their hands were steady.

"What the hell Potter? We need to keep him from sharing this information. This isn't a fun little mystery we're trying to solve. This could be the key piece of the puzzle in getting to Malfoy's death and maybe even one of the Dark Lord's schemes. If an ally of his inside the school did this to Malfoy we need to find them and dispatch them."

Harry couldn't disagree with what Greengrass was saying but was still unable to agree to do a memory charm. Besides, how good could a sixteen year old witch's memory charm be? Scrambling a student's brains would be just as damaging as if the student were to spread a rumor about the two of them.

"No. He didn't do anything wrong. I'm sure we could talk him out of sharing any information."

Daphne's voice rose, obviously exasperated by his recalcitrance. "That's Nott's second son, Potter! You know who Lawrence Nott is, don't you?"

"Yeah, he's a Death Eater."

"He was one of the first Death Eaters, Potter. One of Voldemort's most trusted minions. You don't think maybe Nott is employing his sons to keep tabs on what's going on in the school?"

She had a point, but didn't want to stoop to memory charming a defenseless student, even if he was Lawrence Nott's son. Sins of the father and all that.

"The Notts are rich and have more to gain through sharing this information rather than trying to pay him off. It's the only way, Potter. Trust me, I'm good at these. My father insisted we learn them as soon as we were able to hold a wand. It's an easy application of this too. Gregory Nott has almost no other direct memory of you so this one will be easy to remove from his head."

Harry couldn't argue with that and his limited knowledge of the operation of memory charms led him to believe she was right. She was also right that any hope of solving this mess would be gone if Voldemort caught wind of their efforts. There's no way they'd leave any loose ends if word got back to the inner circle that he was poking around. Something didn't seem quite right though. Greengrass's motives were still unclear to him. Even if all of the Slytherins weren't supporters of Voldemort, none of them opposed him and were indifferent at best. Greengrass made it seem like she couldn't stand Draco and what his family stood for.

"Why are you so eager to find Malfoy's killer anyway?"

"That's none of your business. All you need to know is that my family has no great love of the Dark Lord and stands to gain more when he is defeated than if he manages to gain control. There aren't many of us, but there are a few of us in Slytherin and even a segment of the most ideological of Ravenclaw families who oppose him."

"Ravenclaw?"

"Intelligence doesn't always breed tolerance, Potter. Now give me back my wand so I can clean up this mess and get out of here before it gets worse."

"I don't like this," he said, seeing no choice but to give her back her wand. Harry felt guilty about doing this despite agreeing that there was no other realistic option that would ensure their going unnoticed. She was right that it was likely to make its way back to Voldemort and any hope of finding Malfoy's killer would be gone and additionally place her and himself in further danger. He handed it to her reluctantly. She snatched it out of his hand with more eagerness than he would have liked. "You promise you know how to perform these well?"

"Want me to test it on you?"

"How would I know?"

"If you didn't know it would have worked."

If Harry was being honest with himself, he was more than a little happy to see her wand pointed at the other person. Memory charms were a truly terrifying concept for him. To be able to just pluck a memory out of somebody's head without them realizing it was as unforgivable as any of the other Unforgivables and only remained thus so the Ministry could legitimize one of their most powerful weapons. She strode over to the lying form of Gregory Nott and revived him. Before he had a chance to orient himself and reach full awareness she muttered an _Obliviate_ and a green light burst out of her wand and hit Nott in the forehead. His eyes sliding out of focus made Harry uncomfortable all over again. She stunned him and levitated him into the air.

"Alright, that's done. Good thing one of us has a tough enough stomach for this. I'm going to place him down in the corridor a little way down from this door. Please leave before me so the coast is clear. I'll see you next week, Potter. I hope our little chat will prove more useful next time."

Harry, not wanting to stay in the room with her any longer, strode out the door without looking back. Not wanting to go back to Gryffindor Tower quite yet, he started making his way down to the Great Hall and outside. Some fresh air would do him good after what happened in that classroom. He knew they were justified in what they did, and he wasn't even the one to wield the wand, but still felt wrong about it. They didn't know what he heard or even if he planned to report to his father. Could have worked harder to buy his compliance. Memories were such an inviolate part of a person it felt wrong how willing Greengrass was to wipe one from his brain, despite the justification for doing so.

He was also puzzled by Greengrass's eagerness to find Malfoy's murder and apparently not for justice for the Malfoy family, rather to hasten Voldemort's defeat. He admittedly did not know much about the Greengrass family but found it hard to reason why they would put themselves at such risk to see his downfall. This bold approach also begged the question as to why she was being so reluctant to share information with him. He was starting to think he was going to need to solve the puzzle of Daphne Greengrass before the he could solve the murder of Draco Malfoy.

 **A/N:** Another chapter gone and things are starting to heat up a little. Hope you've been enjoying it! Thanks for reading and we'll see you again in a week or two.


	4. IV

**IV**

"What do you think you're going to do?" asked Ron as they left their Charms class, the din of the students in the corridor masking their conversation from anyone who could overheard. "You need more information somehow and it doesn't seem like Dumbledore is all that inclined to turn the screws on Snape."

"I don't know if Snape has anything to offer. He may be their head of house, but even so, if he were your head of house would you see any reason to trust him much beyond you already do? He treats them almost the same as the rest of us, just takes off fewer points when they do something stupid."

"Fair enough. Maybe we can ambush Parkinson late at night and try and get her to talk? Has Dumbledore taught you any truth or compulsion spells?"

"Even if he did, he's not supposed to use those on other students, Ron," interjected Hermione. "I do have on idea. I still have the recipe for Polyjuice Potion hidden away in my copy of our second year potions textbook…"

Harry could have kissed her. This is exactly what he needed. Even if Greengrass was being more forthcoming with information at this juncture he wasn't sure how much of it was true and what was being said to try and mislead him. This would allow him direct access to Slytherins as well as observing Greengrass free of the artifice of their face to face meetings, giving him a chance to decide if continuing to work with her was beneficial. It was far preferable to using mind altering spells, spells he learned from Dumbledore and not yet told Hermione and Ron he knew, to force the information from an unwilling and unfortunate Slytherin student. None of them were particularly harmful, they mostly made the recipient more open to suggestion or a greater willingness to telling the truth, but the bad taste in his mouth left by Greengrass's casual use of a memory charm made him even more sure he would only ever use them as a last resort.

"I like the idea of Polyjuice. It's the only way I'm ever going to get unfiltered information out of that house. How long before we can start?"

"I can get it set up today. Thankfully, the store cupboard we have access to as sixth years already has all of the ingredients we need so there won't be any need to steal from Snape again."

Ron's face fell. "But that was the best part. Are you sure there isn't anything you need from him? Maybe even a cauldron?"

Hermione shook her head, a small smile on her face. "No, Ron. Not even a cauldron. And now with the Room of Requirement we won't even have to hide it in a bathroom."

"This seems a lot easier than it should be," said Harry, ignoring Ron's pouting face. "I suppose the harder part is that we aren't second years thinking we're smart enough to interrogate Malfoy. We have to be able to impersonate our target well enough to convince even the most committed Voldemort," Ron winced at that, "supporter to divulge what happened to Malfoy to us. Cut it out Ron. If you're going to help with this you're going to have to get used to it."

"You didn't grow up hearing stories of all the terrible things he did. Maybe if you had you'd forgive a little wincing now and then."

Hermione stopped them in the corridor, letting the rest of the students pass them by on their way to lunch. Harry hoped she had something useful to say. For somebody as smart as she was, he couldn't help but think she could do a better job communicating it to the rest of them. Most people respected intelligence, not many respected imperiousness. The hallway fell silent as the three of them stood there, not speaking. It looked like Hermione was trying to choose her words carefully. When she finally spoke, her voice bounced off the walls, ringing with a confidence it usually lacked.

"Hermione?"

"Tell me, Ron, how many people did Voldemort kill? A few hundred, maybe? A thousand?"

Ron rubbed the back of his neck. "I don't know if they ever released an official estimate. Probably more than a few hundred, less than a thousand."

"Certainly not an insignificant number," Hermione seemed to chew over something before continuing. "Have you ever heard of Adolf Hitler?"

"Who?" said Ron.

"Adolf Hitler was an Austrian Muggle who was the catalyst for a war that claimed the lives of over sixty million people, including well over half of a specific group of Muggles called Jews. Muggles don't shudder every time they hear his name though. They've used the destruction and devastation caused by his orders and ideology as inspiration to attempt to build a better world for all Muggles in a society as heterogeneous as theirs. If magical peoples knew even a little bit about the history of that conflict, they might not be so quick to cower in fear at even the slightest utterance of his name and maybe would have built a society based on merit and equality instead of family and prejudice. Magic makes it far too easy to avoid your problems."

Ron started and stopped talking a couple of times before finally stringing together a response to Hermione. "There are a lot more Muggles than us though."

"True," she said. "But let me say that again. Sixty million people. And some say that's on the low end. Sixty million people killed because of the delusions of one man. Voldemort is terrible, but the magnitude of destruction wreaked by he and his followers pales in comparison to what Hitler did to the Muggle world."

"Ok. But you don't know what it was like, Hermione. They would show up to someone's house and kill everyone inside, leaving only the Dark Mark hovering above the ruins of the structure…"

"Muggles kill each other on a scale wizards can't even imagine. Muggles drop bombs, like containers of Fiendfyre, from the sky. They can wipe away a city the size of London in a few hours, the only thing left the smoke hovering over the ruined buildings."

"But the Muggles…"

"They're still people, Ron, just like you and I. Just because they can't do magic doesn't mean we aren't the same species. It's that sort of attitude that keeps the elves enslaved, the goblins repressed, the…"

And she was off, describing the ills of the Wizarding world while Ron tried to argue in vain about why she was wrong. Harry mostly agreed with her, staying silent as he knew her eloquence would outweigh any possible contribution he could make. Dumbledore, for all his purported tolerance and progressive ideals, wasn't doing much to counter the ignorance in their world. At the very least, he should require Muggle Studies for all first year students. Those from magical families would come to understand a bit more about the people they lived in parallel with but rarely interacted with and those from Muggle families would gain perspective on how the way their world is viewed by the one they are entering. At the very least it would shine a light on the darkness of ignorance. Even the Weasleys, with Arthur's interest in the Muggle world, were sorely uninformed about how they lived their lives. Wizards often criticized Muggles for being closed minded even though Muggles were able to do things like go into outer space and understand the world on a level not visible to the human eye. Magic made life easy and that ease bred a degree of ignorance in the general population.

"...I understand your point, Hermione. I do think that Muggles are people. They can't do magic though so they're a different type of people. Just like how we're different because you're a woman and I'm a man and Harry's a boy…"

"I heard that, Ron. I've got to agree with Hermione here, mate. You could use a crash course in Muggle Studies."

"I'd rather eat lunch," Ron said, as they entered the Great Hall.

He hurried over to the table and loaded up his plate with whatever was near at hand. Hermione stopped Harry before he was able to follow and leaned close so no one could overhear them. He noticed Greengrass looking at them from the Slytherin table, a crease in her brow. Harry couldn't help but think that girl was too suspicious for her own good. Her face always displayed some level of consternation: furrowed brow, pursed lips, cheeks displaying signs of vigorous rubbing. This only amplified his growing doubts about her usefulness as an informant.

"Harry, did Dumbledore ever say what killed Malfoy?"

"No, I don't think he ever has."

"I'd ask him, that might help narrow down the suspects. The potion used to kill him would have had to have been very complex or obscure to avoid detection it'd have to be the work of a very skilled wizard or at least someone with the help of one. Traces of Muggle influence in the method might point to a Muggleborn…"

"Good point, Hermione. I meet with Dumbledore tomorrow, I'll ask him then."

They walked towards the lunch table, Harry glancing Greengrass's way. She was no longer looking at him, her attention on the food in front of her and the younger student next to her [possessing a vague similarity in appearance to her. If Greengrass had a younger sibling, that'd be a prime candidate for the Polyjuice Potion. No need to worry about a random Slytherin student suddenly trying to pry information from her.

"I think Astoria Greengrass would be a perfect student to impersonate once the potion is ready," Hermione said, smiling far too innocently at him as they sat down on either side of Ron. Harry quickly drew his glance, which had made its way over to Greengrass again, back to Hermione. "For more than one reason."

* * *

"Well, Mr. Potter, I have to say that was an excellent blasting charm," Dumbledore said, as held up a piece of metal in front of his face and looked through the smoking hole in the middle. "I can't say I've ever met someone other than myself or Tom who managed to put a hole through a solid piece of metal such as this. I do not think spells of intent and raw power will ever be problem of yours, Harry. While we will not want to neglect the learning of more magic that will use your talent to the fullest, I believe it may be time to expand your horizons with some skills involving a bit more finesse."

Harry couldn't help but pleased at this judgment. If all else failed, he would always be able to keep someone on their toes with a deluge of raw power. These first few months of lessons with Dumbledore had been tests of his power and how he could channel it from the environment around him. The only limit to his power was what was available to him in the world around him, as he was a remarkably good channel for it. Magic was not something innate within the wizard, Dumbledore had explained, it was their ability to channel it from the world around them. Some wizards could barely channel more than a Muggle, who could channel none or very very slight amounts of magic, while some, like he and Dumbledore, could force practically eliminated quantities of it to do their bidding. The words they spoke were only a focal point, the magical substances of their wand and a predisposition to absorbing the magic in the environment around them is what gave them the ability to use magic in such impressive ways.

"You may find some of these exercises difficult at first. We've spent the last few months acclimating you to channeling magic and it might take some time to bring you back to doing spells that require the utmost control. A blasting charm can be fired off without much thought, but put too much power into a memory charm and you may go from wiping a five seconds of a person's memory to wiping five years from their consciousness."

"That sounds like much more work than pouring raw power into a spell."

"Very much so, Harry," they settled into their usual seats across Dumbledore's desk. "On the rare occasion I am forced to use a memory charm or something akin I find myself needing a few extra moments of concentration even with all of my years and experience. It doesn't take much to make a mistake and experience can be a harsh teacher."

A faraway look appeared in Dumbledore's eyes as he stared out the window into the deepening night. This was not an infrequent occurrence during these lessons and Harry wanted to know where Dumbledore went. A one hundred and fifteen year old wizard would have myriad memories to fall into, to relive when they are reminded of the past by the present. It was in these moments when Harry was reminded of what the Headmaster said to him in his first year, that it was best to not dwell on dreams and forget to live. He wondered if Professor Dumbledore was starting to forget some of his own advice the longer he lived, the speed of new memories no longer outracing those in the past trying to catch up to him. His mentor looked old. Of course, he always looked old. Even when Harry was a first year Dumbledore looked old, with his wrinkles, white hair and beard, and wizened hands, but it was in these personal meetings were he looked all of his years, as if the burden he had shouldered in defending Britain's wizarding community from darkness was finally catching up to him when he was preparing to pass it off. Harry wanted that burden. He wanted to be there for his friends and for all of the innocent peoples depending on a leader. It was not yet time for that conversation though. They had a killer to catch.

"Any new information for us, Harry?"

"No, sir. Nothing to report. Greengrass has been uncooperative so far but I think I've made some progress in winning her trust. Hopefully in the next meeting or two I can start to get some insight into the circumstances surrounding the runup to Draco's death."

"Excellent, Harry. That is progress all on its own. I do have a tangible lead to report myself. A source of mine tells me that Theodore Nott and Mr. Malfoy were at loggerheads shortly before his death. Now this may mean nothing, as young men arguing with each other is no rare occurrence, but it may be worth pursuing. As you know, both Lucius Malfoy and Lawrence Nott are held in high esteem by Tom, so it's possible some conflict between the elder Malfoy and Nott managed to find its way to the youngers. It may be worth asking if Ms. Greengrass can keep an eye on Mr. Nott and see if he's acting in a manner outside his normal nature."

Harry's mind went into high alert when he heard Dumbledore speak that name. One Nott appearing could be chalked up to a coincidence, just a young kid wandering the corridors caught eavesdropping on a few older students in an empty classroom. He was sure that wasn't the first time a younger student stumbled on a pair of advanced years in a compromising situation in an out of the way room. Harry could accept that. He could even accept Nott and Malfoy getting into arguments now with Voldemort operating out in the open again. Their followers weren't exactly known for loyalty to their leader, much less each other, and when you combine those disagreements along with the rivalry present among most of the old Pureblood families for wealth and status, their conflict alone did not seem out of the ordinary. Both of those things happening without being connected was a little beyond Harry's ability to attribute to chance. Harry caught Dumbledore looking at him, but he avoided his gaze. He had no wish to share the story of his encounter with Gregory Nott quite yet.

"Does the name Nott ring any bells to you, Harry?" Dumbledore asked.

"No, sir. Other than I know of Theodore Nott. I've been in classes with him but I can't say I've interacted with him beyond that."

"No, I don't suppose that you would have. We need to be wary of the Notts, Harry. The Malfoys have allowed their money to do most of the work for them, rarely stooping to brute force or other methods of getting their way. The Notts, on the other hand, lack the levels of wealth the Malfoys do and have developed an unsavory reputation as a result. Though as it always is in such circumstances, some is rumor and suspicion, I have done some investigation and found not all of these rumors to be unsubstantiated. Severus assures me the Nott children are nothing to be worried about, but Lawrence may have sought to change that since the resurrection of their master."

"Do you think it was Nott, sir?"

Dumbledore gave a sad sort of laugh. "It certainly could be, Harry. He as much as any other student in this school or otherwise malevolent force which has managed to infiltrate the school under my nose. It could be any of them. I am no more sure at this juncture than you are. What are your plans to obtain more information?"

He wasn't sure if he should divulge to Dumbledore their plans about brewing up another round of Polyjuice to take them into the Slytherin common room as a Slytherin student. Harry didn't think Dumbledore would be too pleased by that plan despite neither of them having any better ideas and they were running up to almost a month now since Malfoy passed. The small trail they had was going to go cold if they didn't act quickly and the perpetrator would be able to clean up the remaining evidence of their crime.

"Professor, I, well actually Hermione, had an idea. We were thinking of maybe brewing Polyjuice Potion and impersonating a Slytherin student to try and get more information out of them," Harry left the 'it worked once' out.

Dumbledore looked over his steepled fingers from across the desk at Harry for almost a minute, stone faced. Harry didn't blame him. Extenuating circumstances included, advanced age incorporated, it was probably the first time in his life one of his students told him about using Polyjuice Potion to impersonate a fellow student in order to obtain covert access to the members of a rival, one could even go as far as to say hostile, house. Dumbledore was acting like he was considering the idea. Harry didn't know if he was more worried or relieved by that.

"This is a most unusual situation, Harry, and truth be told I'm at a bit of a loss as how to respond to it. Your proposal has merit. They will of course be more willing to talk to one of their fellow housemates. On the other hand, as the headmaster responsible for the wellbeing of the people at this school, I don't think I can endorse this plan. We will find other ways to obtain this information and do not need to resort to such questionable techniques," Dumbledore shifted back in his seat. "That being said, I do encourage you to proceed with brewing this potion. It may be of assistance in the next few months and it keeps extremely well."

He thought that an odd bit of an advice but filed it away for later use. Besides, Hermione would enjoy the challenge of brewing the potion and contributing to the overall effort of finding the killer within the school. Alternative methods were in short supply. His only interactions with the Slytherins were either of cool indifference, antagonism, or his weird partnership with Greengrass. He never had a real conversation with any of them and doubted they'd start to change their tune towards him anytime soon. Dumbledore wasn't onboard with magical methods so he'd have to figure out a way to ingratiate himself with at least a few of them. He could pretend to change his thinking about Voldemort, but didn't see that working out in enough time. Direct confrontation wasn't the Slytherin's style either. He'd have to learn more about Nott first.

"I think I'm going to have to think on this one some more, sir. I understand your not wanting to put anyone else in harm's way."

"Thank you, Harry. I will of course ponder this myself. Severus may be able to lend some insight. I have my doubts that Draco Malfoy's killer is within the confines of that house, but, rare as it may be, I have been wrong before and it is best we follow all leads to their logical conclusion." He checked his watch. "It is almost ten, Harry. Perhaps we leave our discussion here for the evening. Please come back the day after tomorrow. Same time. We must do our best to expedite this investigation before it slips through our fingers."

Harry said his good night and left the office, catching a glimpse of Dumbledore staring out the window again. In his mind's eye he could see himself sitting in that chair staring out that window someday in the future. After ridding the world of Voldemort, it would only seem apt to continue the mission to rid the world of ignorance and fear by sowing the seeds tolerance and altruism among its young, to give the community its best chance to never face the challenge of another Voldemort type wizard again. Dumbledore made progress, opening up the wizarding community to more Muggle-borns, viewing other creates as equals, and a more progressive view of what magic is and what it could do. Harry could build upon that progress and take it even further. He saw a world where Muggles and wizards lived together in harmony, magic and Muggle science combining to create revolutionary inventions, forever moving the human race inexorably into a future once only dreamed of in science fiction novels. Before that day could come they had a murder to solve.

* * *

He was close to the Great Hall when it happened. Wanting a snack after spending most of the evening with Dumbledore he made his way down to the kitchens where Dobby was happy to satiate his appetite in anyway he could. In retrospect, it was probably for the best it happened in the Great Hall because if he been caught off guard in an out of the way corridor or empty classroom he might not have made it. He was accustomed to irritating jinxes and hexes, maybe a enough to cause a bruise or small cut, from his Slytherin antagonists. It was almost second nature these days to be ready for one of them to try hit him when his back was turned. This is what saved him. He felt the spell before he saw it and was able to drop to the floor and watch the jet of orange light pass through the space previously occupied by his head. The large black mark left behind on the wall where it ultimately landed did not provide him much comfort.

He cursed himself for relaxing so much, misjudging the late hour and empty corridors for safety instead of vulnerability. He pulled his wand out of his robes and picked himself off the floor, settling into a crouch behind the Hufflepuff table. He was sure the spell came from the direction of the entrance into the dungeons and kept his eyes trained in that direction. Hearing the sounds of feet and heavy breathing coming from that way he moved slowly down the length of the table, away from what he was guessing was at least two or three people emerging from the dungeons, to try and circle around and attack them from behind. A barrage of spells, consisting mainly of a violent version of _Expelliarmus_ called _Expulsiarmus_ and stunners, flew past the spot where he had been the moment before. He was granted a brief reprieve from the spellcasting but could hear his assailants muttering amongst themselves on the far side of the Slytherin table. He paused for a minute, trying to come up with a plan. Dumbledore and he had not spent much time on actual battlefield tactics in their lessons thus far, choosing to instead focus on expanding on Harry's knowledge base and refining his skills before moving into the more technical aspects of dueling and other sorts of magical battles. There was nothing to do about that now. Besides, a combination of raw skill and instinct proved enough to get him past Voldemort four times to date and these opponents couldn't possibly match what he overcame in those situations.

Steeling himself, he prepared to go after them with a rapid barrage of magic that he hoped would knock them off balance and out of the fight. He didn't want to kill them, but with the way the atmosphere had been at Hogwarts since Malfoy's death he was worried they did not share the same qualms as he. He heard voices and the shuffling of feet on the flagstone floor from roughly where he thought they were hiding and decided to make his move before they had a chance to set themselves and coordinate an attack. He closed his eyes and held his wand vertically in front of his face, taking a deep breath in an attempt to calm his heart rate. The more adrenaline racing through his system the less control over his spells. Hearing their whispering begin to rise towards a crescendo, he knew they were about ready.

His first spell was one to cast a temporary shade over his eyesight in preparation for the light he filled the room with, the _Solas_ spell, a supercharged _Lumos_ , as bright as if they tore open the roof of the Great Hall on a clear and sunny day, subjecting everyone in the hall to a retina scorching assault. The plaintive moaning alerted him to his success. Taking advantage of his good fortune, he swept his wand out in front of him and cast a wide radius banishing spell, flipping the house tables in the area of the hall he assumed his his opponents were. At least two muffled shouts greeted this action, letting him know he landed the first blow. A jet of green light raced to him from the side, a spell Harry recognized and was pretty sure would cover him in acid, narrowly missed. The prompt counterattack alerted him to the face at least one more opponent remained and there was no telling how long his trick with the house tables was going to keep their friends out of the battle. He conjured a huge flock of birds using the _Avis Inflictus_ charm, which replaced the birds normally conjured by the _Avis_ charm into something a bit more aggressive, and sent them off into the abyss, trying to delay them getting their bearings in the fight as he crawled under the Hufflepuff table and made it one more row closer to the door. If he could get under the Ravenclaw table and through the door he was confident his knowledge of the castle surpassed theirs and he'd be able to find help before they caught up to him. A Stunning Spell sent his way and only narrowly halted by a hastily conjured brick wall urged him forwards.

The screams and the clatter of wands hitting the floor from the birds finding their target of vulnerable organs or soft, fleshy areas meant he likely only had to do deal with one assailant as he made his break for the door. The other two, and he was pretty confident with the reactions to his casting and the return fire there was only three of them, was down for the count for the time being. Those birds could be nasty little things. He would have like to have tried something more permanent, like stunning or binding spells, but he couldn't see where they were and those needed a precise target to be effective. Instead, he settled for more area magic, enough to discourage them from firing so he could make his break for it. He started in on a complicated fire conjuration, similar to the blue bell flames that were a favorite of Hermione's, which produced a huge amount of ash and ember similar to a real fire, when a slicing curse dug deep into his shoulder. He grunted and fell to the ground. He was lucky it was only a glancing blow, the nature of the curse meant it probably would have taken his arm clean off and not just opened up a wide gash. It's ability to resist the few rudimentary battlefield medicine spells he knew made him worry that it was a darker version of the slicing curse than anyone at Hogwarts had a right to know. Those sorts of wounds were notoriously tricky to heal and are often never the same, but he had no time to worry about that then. Gritting his teeth through the pain he conjured his flames in the center of the house table in front of him and let them sit for a moment drawing attention.

"...just put them out…" he heard from a spot closer than he expected them to be. He did hope they would try and blast it with water first as those would only add fuel to this particular version of fire, aptly described as _Swamp Fire_ , due to its affinity for water and inherently messy nature. Lucky for him, they complied. The fire grabbed hold of the stream of water exiting the other person's wand and made its way up the line, as fire will do to any accelerant. He cast a separate gust of wind at the base of the fire on the table, blowing all of the fire, smoke, and ash towards that end of the hall. A huge plume of smoke went up and the coughing and grunting let him know at least some of it found the faces of his opposition. Bracing himself, he decided it was now or never and made a break for it before his opponents had a chance to retaliate. He vaulted the Ravenclaw table and made it to the door without incident, casting a series of cutting spells into the slowly dissipating smoke to force them to floor one last time and buy a few extra precious seconds.

He slipped over the threshold and locked the door behind him, sealing the door with a _Colloportus_ as well as a secondary one that would make the door resistant to a simple _Alohomora_ for a time. He followed those with an enchantment he took pride in, working with Dumbledore over the course of a few weeks of lessons to get it right. A version of the _Explusimarus_ spell that could be embedded in an object. Anyone who tried to touch the door or threshold would be blasted off their feet. Smiling grimly at the outcome of the battle he rushed off back towards Dumbledore's office not wanting to sit around and find out how long his handiwork would hold. The corridors were empty, Harry lucky he did not cross paths with a teacher or other authority figure alerted to the commotion in the Great Hall and avoiding the need to spend precious minutes explaining to whoever stopped him what had transpired.

He arrived without incident and the gargoyle moved aside for him without the password as if he were expected. He reached the top of the stairs and was just about to knock when he heard Dumbledore's voice asking him to come in. Both McGonagall and Dumbledore were inside with their wands drawn and faces set. Harry was about to speak before Dumbledore pre-empted him. There was no trace of the usual joviality or mystery he was so accustomed to with the headmaster.

"Let us attend to the Great Hall, Harry. I believe there is some hope yet we can get a hold on your assailants. It is time we put an end to the troubles which plague or school."

 **A/N:** There you have it. Took a bit longer to get up than I would have liked and I hope to be able to turn the next few chapters around quicker now that we're really getting into the meat of the story. Let me know what you think. Thanks for reading!


	5. V

**V**

They made it down to the Great Hall in record time, the aged professors moving faster than Harry could have ever dreamed of. They arrived at the scene as Harry had left it: strewn about house tables and benches and a few walls that were worse for wear. Unsurprisingly, no sign of the perpetrators remained. Dumbledore murmured some words and waved his wand through the hall, briefly illuminating the areas where his wand passed in gold. Harry recognized it as a common Auror charm that made an imprint of the state of a location before setting it to rights. This imprint could be viewed in a Pensieve later and removed the need to preserve indefinitely the remnants of crime in a place under investigation. He waved his wand again and the benches and tables flew black to their original places, none the worse for wear. McGonagall was able to restore the walls except for the spot where the slicing curse had struck. McGonagall murmured something to him and Dumbledore nodded, looking sad.

"That will have to fade in time, Minerva. It is not worth the time and energy it would take to dispel the dark energy myself. The same for your shoulder, Mr. Potter. We will take you to the hospital wing shortly, for what it good it will do." He sighed and looked around. "It's about time we put a portrait in this hall. It has long lingered near the top of my to-do list but has been losing out to higher priority items like defeating a Dark Lord and preserving the rights of the less fortunate in our society. Can you please walk us through the events?"

Harry walked the two of them through an outline of the battle, trying to go as in depth as to what the people looked and sounded like as possible, which wasn't much beyond male sounding voices and dark cloaks. He also went through the spells he used and observed as best he could. Dumbledore assured him that they would be able to fill in any details Harry was not able to share after reviewing the contents of the imprint he took earlier. There was much consternation and grimacing from the three of them but soon enough they determined nothing could be done, despite Harry's pleas to go barging into the four common rooms and see if they could not find the assailants before they found a chance to destroy any incriminating evidence that had attached itself to them.

"We're not going to do that Mr. Potter. We can try and ascertain what happened by contacting the portraits around the respective dormitories though I do not know how much a course of action such as that would accomplish. I'm as concerned about this escalation as you are but we do not want to draw unnecessary attention to it. It's very likely they were not looking for you specifically and it was coincidence that brought you together. If they were really looking to ambush you, would it not be better to do it nearer to Gryffindor Tower rather than hoping you wander into the Great Hall late in the evening? Come. Let us proceed to the hospital wing where I'm sure Madam Pomfrey will relish the chance to lecture you about your recklessness while stemming your bleeding."

He followed them out of the hall, walking slightly behind the two professors as they spoke quietly about a disciplinary matter growing out of one of McGonagall's classes earlier in the day. Sounded like a Hufflepuff third year finally had enough bullying from one of the Slytherins and tried to turn him into a bug. He failed, but it seemed like the weird bug-human hybrid the offending student was stuck as for a few minutes while McGonagall worked to undo the incredibly botched transfiguration was quite the sight to behold. Dumbledore was right in that it would be a poor plan on their part to hang around in the Great Hall waiting for him to come by. Unless it wasn't he they were waiting for. His effort to hide the fact he was meeting with Dumbledore every Sunday was minimal so it would not have taken someone long to catch on to this routine. He couldn't shake the feeling that Nott was responsible for this. His name kept coming cropping up. He felt like this was the opening salvo of the final crescendo of this moment. First round was Malfoy. Second was going to be either him or the Notts.

* * *

"Is that finally enough evidence for you that it's not Professor Burbage, Ron? Harry said none of the people in the Great Hall last night looked like the professor."

"She could have bewitched them all! Or Polyjuice! Harry said he never got a good look at any of them."

Harry sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. This theory of his started appearing intermittently over the past few days despite his presumption Ron agreed with the 'Parkinson, Notts, or both' hypothesis. Ron had seemed convinced by the evidence put for the Nott brothers being the culprit after Harry mentioned running into them after Defense Against the Dark Arts. They had both been suspicious in his explanation of those events. Keeping with his promise to Dumbledore he kept Daphne's involvement a secret and even though they eventually accepted his story, he could tell Hermione only did so with great skepticism. Now, he worried Ron's concern with Burbage was starting to grow into a fixation, despite the lack of any sort of evidence pointing to her as the killer or being involved in it in anyway whatsoever. Maybe this was his way of filling in the gaps of the narrative. No matter how much he and Hermione, her especially, tried to talk him down from what was becoming an obsession, he kept coming back to it recently. Charity Burbage, puppet master.

"Why do you think it's her, Ron? We keep having the same argument and you never really cite a specific reason," said Hermione. "Is it because she teaches Muggle Studies?"

"What? No! Of course not, I don't have anything against her because she teaches Muggle…" Ron stopped for a second, mouth paused mid-sentence. "Wait a minute! Maybe it is because she teaches Muggle Studies!"

"What are you on about, Ron?"

"Now bear with me for a minute. What if I told you that she didn't kill Malfoy because of You-Know-Who, but because of his dislike of Muggles and the Muggle-born? It would be the perfect time to do it! With You-Know-Who on the rise it'd be easy for people to believe it was simply due to some kind of problem with him or his dad and not the Muggle Studies teacher, out for revenge!"

"Come on, Ron. That's ridiculous. Why would the Muggle Studies professor kill Malfoy?"

"Why wouldn't she? His family is one of the most prominent critics of Muggles and the Muggle-borns in our society. She's trying to make a statement."

"She's a professor though, Ron. She wouldn't hurt a student."  
"Couldn't she though?" Harry broke into the conversation. "There's one terrorist group already, why can't there be another? Both you and I learned of the IRA growing up." Harry didn't really believe Burbage was involved, but the more they talked about it, the less far-fetched it seemed. It also forced them to discuss different facets of the case, preventing them from getting hung up on anyone detail or suspect for too long. Harry also enjoyed watching Ron rile up Hermione.

"You mean those Irish nutters?"

"You've heard of the IRA, Ron?" Hermione asked, surprise on her face. "You didn't even know who Hitler was."

"Yeah I do. I'm not completely ignorant of the Muggle world, Hermione. The wizarding world had an equivalent to them back in the 60's and 70's before the Ministry granted them more independence. The Irish are a bit off their rocker regardless of their ability to do magic if you ask me though."

Harry couldn't help but laugh while Hermione went into a lecture of about how Ron shouldn't be looking at people that way and with the way he thought about the Irish it was no wonder why he thought that house elves shouldn't have equal rights. Harry kept quiet. It wasn't that he disagreed with Hermione, he agreed with her completely, it was just that it was hard for him to reconcile these facts with how casually the rest of the wizarding world disregarded them. Muggles were self-absorbed but the ability to do magic increased that tendency tenfold in the wizarding population. When you never need anyone's help because you magick your problems away it was easy to forget the needs and contributions of those around you. It certainly didn't do the government any favors. Wizards could take care of themselves, the government's main purpose providing a loose framework to prevent them from killing each other, accidently and otherwise.

"Enough about the Irish you two. Ron, I agree with Hermione. I don't think there's any evidence of Burbage being responsible other than your speculation," Ron started to object but Harry cut him off. "Whoever attacked me is a secondary concern at the moment. We're still nowhere closer to figuring out who killed Malfoy than we were at the start of this. So far Parkinson and the Notts are the only real lead into this and I intend on pursuing it."

"What about the Polyjuice, Harry?"

"Dumbledore was against it. I suppose what he doesn't know won't hurt him. At the very least, it won't hurt to have some on hand if things go south over the next few months. Hermione, can you see what you can find about the Notts? They're a pretty prominent family, I'm sure there's something about them in the library. Ron, would your dad be able to dig up anything the Ministry may have on them? I want to try and put together a firm reasoning for going after them before we do so. It'll justify what Dumbledore does after we stop them."

They both agreed, Hermione mentioning a couple of texts with possibly pertinent information that came to mind, Ron starting to work on a letter to his father to see if any suspicious run-ins with the Ministry or obvious signs of bribery were in the picture. While they got to work on their respective tasks, Harry started planning out his next meeting with Greengrass. It was time to press her a little harder and try and get some real answers. Their few meetings to date were nothing but vague detail and promises of more information at a later date. After fighting off one attack that could be attributed to her reticence to share what she knew, Harry was not in the mood to fight off another. If they were aiming for him, the next attempt would not be by happenstance in the Great Hall. They'd wait him out and hit him when he was vulnerable. Taking it slow was over. It was time to put some pressure on the Slytherins.

* * *

"Alright, Potter, what do you have us all the way out here for?"

He and Greengrass were standing in a secluded spot on the far side of the lake, surrounded by a privacy ward Harry had worked on with Dumbledore. Anybody who approached them would suddenly be reminded of an urgent appointment they needed to take care of as soon as they could. His wand was also close at hand, tired of their conversations being as painful as pulling teeth, he was planning on pushing Greengrass more than he had in the past, which meant he was also prepared for the likely backlash on her part. A person willing to memory charm a thirteen year old boy without a second thought was not somebody Harry wanted to trifle with.

"I'm sure by now you've heard I was attacked in the Great Hall a few nights ago," she nodded so he continued. "I have a hunch that it may have been one of your housemates. I'd appreciate it if you stop being coy and start sharing what you know. I'm not going to be able to help you find out who killed Malfoy if I'm laid up in the hospital wing or dead."

"I know that, Potter. Our original agreement was that you would be sharing information with me as well though and it seems as though on your part there is a precipitous lack of knowledge of the crime to be shared."

Harry sighed angrily. "I can't get that information without your help, Greengrass. Dumbledore and I are not omnipotent and Snape is neither completely trustworthy or has ingratiated himself with his students to be their confidant."

Greengrass snorted. "Yeah, even us Slytherins don't much care for him. One could daresay Malfoy was really the only one he cared about."

"So out with it, Greengrass. What do you know?"

She bit her bottom lip and looked at the ground between them. It was the first time Harry saw her unsure of herself, a cool and aloof exterior giving way to the worry residing inside all of them in these worrisome times. Greengrass looked the way he felt. Scared, worried, barely able to contain the frustration threatening to boil up inside of him at being forced to bear a the burden of the future of an entire nation. In another blink she pulled herself together and looked at him, her bright blue eyes, momentarily open wide, was replaced by the glare she customarily surveyed him with. Her own mask slipping back into place to face the world.

"You're still not holding up your end of the bargain, Potter. How do I know you're not going to turn around and use this against me?"  
"Unless you killed him, and…" he held up a hand on noticing her protest, "...I believe that you didn't. I don't have any reason to anything against you. We both want the same thing, don't we?"

"I'm not sure if we do."

Harry was perplexed at that statement. He couldn't fathom what she could want outside of the identity of Malfoy's assailant other than to try and use his need for information to her advantage. He was close to Dumbledore, if she was caught up in all of this there was surely some information in his brain Voldemort would love access to. Harry unconsciously checked to make sure his wand was still on him. Maybe she was wrapped up in this. Voldemort and his Death Eaters certainly had committed acts far worse than try and seduce a teenage wizard into giving up valuable information through the feminine wiles of one of his attractive classmates. He was worried about what she could find of the prophecy. They might not be able to pull it out of his brain directly due to the magic of them, but they might be able to steal the imprint of the memory of Dumbledore sharing it with him, and Harry had no doubt Voldemort could engineer something to render it useful. At the very least, and Greengrass's casual use of a memory charm reminded him of this, them rummaging around in his head to see if they could come up with anything more valuable was a distinct possibility. He was more tense than he was a minute ago.

"The truth is, Potter…" she started, that same vulnerable look penetrating her features, "...wait, is your hand in your wand?"

She drew her own, pointing it right between his eyes. Harry cursed himself silently. He was on his guard, but hadn't even realized he was gripping his wand. Too many close scrapes in the past combined with Moody's constant grumblings about being vigilant and prepared left him too anxious. He spread his arms slowly, showing her there was no wand in his hand and she slowly raised her wand arm along with his.

"My apologies, Greengrass. I seem to be a bit on edge but it is not directed at you."

She had lowered her wand but kept it tight at her side and, Harry noticed, still pointed in his general direction.

"The truth is, Potter. I don't know anything. I was hoping you did."

"Why is that?"

"I was using you…"  
That was all he needed to hear. His wand was in his hand and pointed at the stunned Greengrass, who didn't even get a chance to raise her own. Her shock was quickly overcame and her stance matched his. He didn't think she would try and kill him, but was prepared to ward off memory charms coming his way or any other sort of conscious altering charms. He also feared she knew enough Legilimency to do some damage and with his only meager Occlumency skills it would not take much to break through his defenses and become privy to whatever information she was seeking.

"What are you doing, Potter?"

"No, Greengrass. It's time for you to answer some questions. What are you doing? I was willing to trust you and was hoping you would come to trust me but now you say you were using me?"

"Just for your information."

"So you weren't really planning on sharing anything with me in return? I made it pretty clear at the outset that our inquiry depended on information you could give us. I don't suppose you've been helping the Notts too?"

"Never."

"Then why should I continue helping you?"

Her eyes darted for a second, examining the area to either side of Harry. He assumed for possible escape routes. He crouched slightly and raised his wand higher; preparing to jump out of the way as soon as her wand flashed. He had no wish to tangle with any sort of memory charm.

"I suppose, for the first time in our meetings, you are the one making sense. You're right, Potter. You shouldn't be helping me. I will have to strike out on my own."

A green flash forced Harry to dive out of the way, and even more fortunate for him, in the right direction as Greengrass appeared to have anticipated his movements. More evidence of being well versed in the mental arts. He rolled onto his knees and took aim at her, bellowing the incantation for three stunners aimed at her in rapid succession and then, when she was distracted by the obvious, summoned a boulder to him that was directly behind her, forcing her into a painful tumble. He took aim, trying to decide if he wanted to put her unconscious painfully or not so painfully when his concentration was broken and he was again forced to move to the side.

" _Obliviate minimus!"_

Face down, she had managed to point her wand in his direction and it was only her position and attempt to remain discreet that kept him from losing the last fifteen minutes of his memory. He supposed she didn't want to damage his mind too much and draw attention to her, especially when Dumbledore would at least be aware of the vague going ons. The most attractive part of the _Obliviate minimus_ spell was that the human brain would try and fill in the gaps, as when you fill in the pieces of a story you're recollecting to your friends that you might not remember all of, doing the worst of the caster's work, concealing the damage, for them. They were also popular against Muggles for that reason. Harry felt confident he was the better duelist and did not wish to risk his memory again over an attempt to deal with Greengrass with a light touch. He conjured a set of chains and an _Aquamenti_ , before freezing the links together, making the opponent more immobile as compared to regular chains and dry clothing. Harry had missed her wand arm though and was bracing for another memory charm, each time thinking she was about to let loose with something he had no experience in countering. Trouble was averted when her bound feet tripped on a tree branch and she landed face first in the dirt. Her wand flew out of her and right to Harry. He picked it up and pocketed it.

"You nearly got me with your last memory charm," he said idly. Suddenly feeling awkward. This was the first time he subdued an opponent that wasn't a classmate in a staged duel or a Death Eater immediately spirited away by Voldemort. If he were a lesser man he might even have considered gloating, but he was Harry Potter so he settled on idle, awkward chatter. He gazed skyward. "Looks like rain."

"Give me back my wand and I'll rain pain down on you," she growled, trying to untangle the chains sneaked around her legs and torso.

"That's why I won't be giving you back your wand until you answer a few of my questions. Now, what exactly was your end game with all of this? I suppose if I didn't currently have your wand in my hand you would keep trying to extract information from me for free?"

Harry lowered the wands but kept them firmly at the ready in case she made a sudden bid for freedom. Seemingly satisfied at no longer being in immediate danger Greengrass sat down on the ground with her back resting on a boulder and looked out across the lake, transporting herself somewhere else momentarily. This lull in the action made Harry uneasy, much as it did the last time she let her guard down around him. Harry always assumed there was more to the steely eyed Slytherin then what she showed in their brief conversations; he wasn't sure if he was ready to find out what exactly it was.

"I don't really know what I was trying to do, Potter. I don't really care about who killed Malfoy and the rest of the Slytherins don't think I did it."

"Then what did you need me for?"

Harry was taken aback by her admission. He could hear Ron's voice in his head, telling him that Slytherins always had an ulterior motive and you couldn't trust the lot of them to be straight with you. For some reason he felt like Daphne was different. He didn't know why else she would have risked so much by memory charming the younger Nott brother. That action was one of desperation. A lot to risk if she didn't have anything to gain. If her house, Snape, or Dumbledore ever found out she did memory charmed a fellow student she would be expelled or worse and there was no reason to memory charm him if she didn't actually need Harry for something. She was a clearly competent human being and Harry had no doubt she could handle the other members of her house. Harry noticed she was looking at him intently.

"What did I need you for? I needed your help, like I said." She must have noticed the confusion on his face because she snorted and continued speaking. "It's my father who's under suspicion, not me. I need your help to prove who killed Malfoy. Nobody seems to know. Or will at least admit it if they do."

Harry was still suspicious of that explanation, but could accept it. He had never heard of a Greengrass involved with Voldemort and wouldn't be surprised if there was a degree of infighting among the more affluent of the country's families that led to mixed loyalties and increased suspicions by both the government and their peers. The Malfoys and Notts were both wealthy, influential, and Dark Lord sympathetic families who had no qualms about disregarding institutional and social norms. They would have no difficulty with knocking out a potential rival. Harry doubted they felt any potential remorse about an outside world conflict bleeding into the country's wizarding school. Of course, the scion of one of those families lay dead these days, so that may have changed the nature of the conflict.

"You're going to have to give some context, Greengrass. For all I know you could be trying to mislead me again."

"Damn it, Potter. You really have almost no idea how our world works, do you?"

Harry was offended by that remark. "I know magic and stuff. I'd say I'm even quite good at it."

She rolled her eyes. "Not that. You still have the mindset of a Muggle. Do you have any idea how our governmental institutions work? The structure of our society? Our cultural norms?"

Truth be told, he didn't. Outside of some of the quirks of being part of wizarding family he picked up from Ron, he didn't know much about the magical world beyond Hogwarts' walls other than Quidditch and who the Minister of Magic was. He told Daphne as much.

"Have you ever wondered why the Dark Lord and his supporters are so resistant to Muggle-borns becoming part of our society? There are many more Muggle-borns and half-bloods than there are purebloods left, but few of you, especially with Dumbledore as headmaster, make strides to learn how our society works."

"What does this have to do with Malfoy and your father?"

"You wanted context, but I suppose this is a discussion for another time. The more immediate source of this conflict is that the Greengrass family, despite our antipathy towards Dumbledore, have steadfastly remained opposed to the Dark Lord. It is my and my father's belief that families in the Dark Lord's inner circle, the Notts primary among them, assume my father was trying to make some sort of statement by killing Draco. There has been a rumor floating around those closest to the Dark Lord that my father was on some kind of mission to declare his loyalties in this conflict in a way no one could ignore. The Notts and Malfoys are now after my father due to their belief he killed Draco to either outwardly declare neutrality or try and prove to Dumbledore that we're on his side this time around," she rolled her eyes. "The latter explanation is of course ridiculous as Dumbledore would never approve of an action like that no matter how justified, which leaves the former. We have never gotten along very well with many of the families close to the Dark Lord, and my father thinks this is just an excuse to take him out once and for all."

"Why should I care about your father?"

Daphne looked taken aback by the question and returned to staring off over the lake. Harry was risking his life looking trying to find out what happened to Malfoy and here she was trying to use him in some large scheme to alleviate the conflict between her family and Voldemort's supporters. As far as he was concerned, he the fate of her father was inconsequential to his success or failure of ending the war. He was mostly concerned these days with making sure he lived out his teenage years, much less saving members of morally ambiguous families. He didn't like feeling that way and Dumbledore would never approve of that line of thinking, but the death of one student and the subsequent attack on his life was encouraging him to think a little differently these days.

She let out a big breath. "I don't really know, Potter. I guess I just assumed you were noble enough to help anyone in distress."

Harry laughed at this. "I've always been told I had a 'saving people thing', but usually the people I'm trying to save aren't attempting to manipulate me to their own ends."

"I guess I can't really deny that."

They stood in silence for a few minutes, looking out over the lake and collecting their thoughts. Harry was not happy. He did not want to risk his life to help out the father of a classmate he barely knew who also may or may not really care about taking care of Voldemort and his followers once and for all. On the other hand, he, Dumbledore, and the rest of the Order could still really use her help passing information from inside their house. Malfoy's death was not going to be an inconsequential event in this war. Somebody that young and from such wealth does not die as a teenager without reason.

"Well, Greengrass, I don't have to like it, but we really do need you. Dumbledore and I will make sure the perpetrator's identity gets out there once he's in our custody and your dad stays safe from the Death Eaters if you start helping us out. No pretending to hold back information anymore even when you don't have any. If we're going to solve this, we need any information you can give us."

Her eyes grew wide and gave way to a look of genuine gratitude that looked foreign are her usually composed features. "Thank you, Potter. I will do what I can to help you."

"Would you swear an oath that you will help us to the best of your ability?"

She paused for a second. Instead of drawing her wand and reciting the words to a standard promissory oath, one which while not necessarily condemning the oathbreaker to death would still lead to repercussions in terms of magical power, reached behind her neck and undid the long silver chain clasped behind it and handed it to Harry. It was a simple necklace, a beautifully crafted silver chain adorned by the darkest emerald he had ever seen. The tarnished metal indicated an age much older than their own.

"I will not give you an oath, Potter. My magic is far too valuable to risk to someone I barely know, who has ideals I don't believe in, working for a cause with little chance of success. I give you this though," handing the necklace to him. He took it from her, watching her reluctant face as he pulled the chain from her grasp. "It has been passed down among the women in my family for generations. It was my mother's and one of the few trinkets she left to me." She noticed Harry looking askance at her. "She was killed in the last war."

He looked at it again, admiring it's beauty. Decades of wear by witches had imbibed it with a magic of its own. He placed it carefully in an inside pocket of his robes. He knew how precious the few things a dead parent left you could be.

"That will do. I promise to keep it safe. Now, do you have any information for me? You know, to reestablish trust?"

"Nott, Crabbe, and Goyle were the ones who attacked you that night. I don't know if they were looking specifically for you or were out wandering the halls for another reason, but they were the only ones missing from the common room that night who could not otherwise be accounted for. They same to be out wandering during the evening regularly these days."

Harry was happy to hear this. For him, this all but confirmed their involvement to some degree in Voldemort's scheme and was as good a reason as any to focus on them. His few appearances with the Notts, after six years of not exchanging a word, were far too coincidental these days to not have any significance behind them.

"Excellent. This has actually been very important for us to confirm. Can you please keep an eye on that group over the next week until we see each other again? Don't put yourself in danger, but if you felt like trying to figure out where they go when they leave the common room, I wouldn't say no."

There was a gleam in her eye that Harry was happy to see was not directed at him.

"Sounds like a plan. We'll meet again this weekend." She checked her watch. "I need to get back. Wait a few minutes before following me."

And she was off, her black robes pulled tight around her lean form. Dumbledore would be happy to see Daphne Greengrass turn into a more willing informant. Harry was happy to see it too. If they could get to Nott, they might be able to get to Voldemort. If they could get to Voldemort, he'd be ready. Harry unconsciously removed the necklace from his breast pocket and held the stone up to the dying light, almost black in the shade thrown off by the sun against the horizon. He could only imagine this to be an heirloom passed down through generations of Slytherins, worn by generations of women with questionable ideals and imperfect sympathies. The sun slipped through the trees and turned the stone a bright green, flooding the surface with a sea of bright light. This time, the necklace would be used as a force for good. The light of justice would shine like the light of the emerald.

* * *

 **A/N:** Well here we are, a day late and a dollar short, but life got in the way the last six weeks. I hope to be able to get the last few chapters along to you with much less delay than this one. Please read and review, whether you like it or dislike it, feedback is always welcome. Thanks for reading!


	6. VI

**VI**

"That's a very interesting story, Harry. You feel confident in her telling the truth, at least what the way she sees it?"

Harry spent the better part of the last hour detailing his conversation with Daphne to the headmaster. He sat in quiet attention, appearing to be even more interested in what Harry had to say than he usually did, pausing the Harry's narrative to ask only pointed questions about tone or circumstance. He did not seem surprised that it was more and more likely pointing to someone in the Nott family as the perpetrator, but did ask him to go into detail about her father.

"I must admit that despite my extensive knowledge of the wizarding world and the people who populate it, I do not know much about the Greengrasses. I have no reason to doubt her claims but would advise you to tread lightly. Do not take the fact that they are not public supporters of Lord Voldemort to be a sign of their trustworthiness. Those sorts of people can be even worse to deal with then those loyal to Tom Riddle."

"Why is that, sir?" Harry couldn't stop himself from asking.

"Never trust a man loyal only to himself, Harry. They could just as easily be at your side as they could with a knife in your back. They'll stand wherever the wind blows them." He clapped his hands. "Anywho, it seems we've found a bit of a breakthrough in our case. I will ask Professor Snape for what he knows about the Notts, elder and younger…"

"You mean what he finds out in Death Eater meetings?"

Dumbledore surveyed him over his glasses. "Professor Snape performs a very valuable service for what is good and just in this world. Do not allow your mutual animosity to cloud that."

Harry couldn't prevent a hint of color from flooding his face.

"Yes, sir. I'm sorry…"

"I do not need your apologies, Harry. Save them for Professor Snape," he then smiled. "But let us return to the task at hand. As they say in the Muggle detective novels, the game is afoot! It is now our opportunity to find justice for Mr. Malfoy and perhaps get a little closer to Tom Riddle himself. Do you happen to have any ideas as to the a way best taking advantage of the opening, however small, provided by your informant?"

"Well, we need information about Nott. She confirmed it was Crabbe, Goyle, and he who attacked me that night in the Great Hall. We need information about his comings and goings and what he's up to."

"That is an excellent point, Harry. But how would we turn this information into something actionable?"

Harry wracked his brains. Even if they knew, or at least were able to generate enough information to support a strong suspicion of guilt, it still wouldn't be enough to prove anything. It would be his word against theirs and the Notts were prominent enough and could leverage enough sympathy for Voldemort among components of wizarding society to keep Dumbledore's word from being enough to hand Nott and the other guilty students over the to the Ministry, much less ensure they stay there. They needed incontrovertible proof of a crime having been committed, enough that the Malfoys and Notts wouldn't be able to bribe the government in letting them go without potentially facing an onslaught of public outrage. If there was one thing the bureaucrats at the Ministry valued more than money was public opinion.

"We need him to incriminate himself. It's going to be hard to prove he had anything to do with Malfoy's murder without threatening him, but if we could catch him in a situation where he's committing another offense, it could be enough to question him about that."

Dumbledore smiled and nodded at him. "Yes, that is what I was thinking as well and I believe this is where Ms. Greengrass's services can prove useful. Does she seem to be an adept user of magic?"

Harry nodded. He had skirted around some of her more questionable actions when summarizing their encounters to the headmaster, but there would be enough detail still to draw that conclusion.

"Excellent. If what Severus has related to me and what I have noted through my observations is true, young Mr. Nott would not be expecting anyone to have taken note of his actions. I believe we can use that to our advantage. I would be surprised if Ms. Greengrass cannot cast a passable disillusionment charm. I would like her to follow him when he leaves the common room on his late night excursions. Using these trinkets," Dumbledore said, opening a drawer on his desk and removing three small glass orbs, handing two of them to Harry, "she can use them to inform us of her whereabouts. They contain a slight compulsion charm that will help you lead you to the location of the other orb. I will have the third one on my person in case I am needed. They will grow hot if the sender of the message is in the presence of spells being cast so we will know if anyone is in danger."

Harry pocketed two of the orbs while Dumbledore slipped the third one into his sleeve. The situation he was being placed into by the headmaster did not make him altogether comfortable, seeing as how we was now responsible for potentially catching a follower of Voldemort in a compromising situation with only an uncertain ally protecting his back. It was their best bet, though, and Harry knew that despite the oddity of being placed in this situation by the headmaster of the school, he would have done it with or without his blessing. He supposed this time around it was better than not to have Dumbledore aware of his actions.

"I'll do my best, sir."

"Of course you will, Harry. I have confidence that we are closing in on a resolution to this unfortunate situation," Dumbledore glanced at the clock. "I think it is time we wrapped up for the evening, Harry. I must prepare for another meeting with Lucius Malfoy, tomorrow," he sighed, and a look of sadness crossed his face. "This time I cannot blame him though, as his son has passed. Good night, Harry."

Harry said his goodbyes and left the office, waving to all of the portraits who at least had the good grace to pretend to be asleep while he was with the headmaster. He walked the quiet halls of Hogwarts back towards the tower, studiously avoiding the temptation brought on by a late night jaunt to the kitchen, his thoughts of a snack fended off by the memory of the pain from his last trip. He was so tired. His feet were as heavy as his thoughts, weighed down by the impending conflict with Voldemort and his followers, in and outside the school. The paintings surveyed him as he past, his footsteps creating a gentle tapping that echoed through the stone corridors, unbroken by man or magic. He slipped past the portrait of the Fat Lady and walked up to bed, dragging himself up the stairs. As heavy as his feet were, as his mind was, they continued to carry on, as they always had.

* * *

"So that's where you've been sneaking off to on the weekends," said Hermione.

He had decided to let Ron and Hermione in on his meetings with Daphne, the noise of their fellow students in Transfiguration attempting to transfigure a log into a beaver making it impossible to be overheard. Ron had been oblivious, completely surprised when he told him about Daphne and their surreptitious meetings and her assistance in providing closure in the murder of Draco Malfoy. Hermione was unsurprised though, as if she completely expected him to be sneaking around the school, cavorting with a Slytherin they barely knew, in an attempt to figure out who killed one of their classmates.

"Greengrass, you say? I don't know much about them. My dad never came home talking about them and she didn't seem to run around with Malfoy's crew, so that's something I guess. I'll have to send a letter home to my dad asking about them. Don't want to get tangled up with a family even more evil than You-Know-Who."

"Who, Ron?" Harry asked, irritated by his insistence on using the moniker. "I don't know who you're referring to."

"Harry…"

"Who is it, Ron?"

"V…V…oldemort," he said, quietly, glancing at the fireplace as if he expected a Killing Curse to come flying through it. "You know how I hate saying it."

"It's time to get over it, Ron. We're in the middle of a war, quite literally a fight for our lives, and you still quiver in fear when using a name."

Ron remained silent under Harry's glare. Nobody spoke for a minute, Ron probably still recovering from saying 'Voldemort', Harry stewing about Ron needing to recover from such a simple act, and Hermione tapping her chin, deep in thought. Wizards, for all their perceived superiority over Muggles, could be an extraordinarily weak minded bunch. A mixture of magical ability supplanting common sense and the frequency of being rendered helpless at any time simply by losing grip of a small piece of wood seemed to create a group of meek individuals, unable or unwilling to offend any person on the off chance it'd be the wrong one. The wizarding world was lucky they were able to hide themselves before Muggles developed modern weapons or they would have been wiped out in an afternoon.

Hermione emerged from her thoughts to break the silence. "Why would Voldemort," she glanced at Ron when she said that. To his credit he did not flinch though it seemed to Harry his jaw was clenched especially tight, "send a student, presumably one as mediocre as Nott, to take out Malfoy? Wouldn't you want to make sure it was done right?"

"It was maybe a message. To the Malfoys or the rest of the world. Maybe Lucius really disappointed him when he was captured and this was his warning he wouldn't take it anymore," Harry responded.

"But why Nott?" said Hermione.

They were all silent for a moment while they considered the question. It didn't make much sense to send a teenager, presumably one of mediocre magical talent and a somewhat close relationship with the target, to assassinate him. Failure was almost guaranteed.

"Maybe he was meant to fail," Ron chimed in. "Hear me out. V...Voldemort wanted Nott to go after Malfoy because it would send a message to their fathers that their failure was serious. I think he assumed Nott would back down or they'd figure it out before one of them was killed, but the threat would be enough to get the older ones to recommit. If Nott ended up going through with it, well, V...Voldemort has never really been the nicest bloke, has he?"

Harry thought about that. It made sense, at face value. Voldemort wanted to punish his follower's failure at the Department of Mysteries, so he sent the son of one of his lower in stature followers, due to the relative disparity of wealth and prestige between he and Malfoy, to go after the son of one held in higher regard. Harry could imagine the Notts were the type of family always looking for a way to climb the ladder and he could also imagine the Malfoys were one of their family's primary antagonists. The motive was there. The question remaining was whether he was able to go through with it. Nott family members were turning up much more frequently than they did in the six previous year. They may not be guilty but they were certainly not doing anything to deflect suspicion.

"So what do you two think? How do we go after them?"

"Didn't you say that Greengrass was helping out? Why not let her risk her hide?" Ron said.

"We can't completely trust her until she gives me reason to and until that point in time all information she gives us has to be taken with a grain of salt," said Harry, absentmindedly waving his wand and managing to turn his log into a fairly realistic beaver, except that instead of fur it was covered in bark. Hermione turned it back before it went lumbering off on its wooden feet. "I don't think she'll outright lie to us anymore, so we're no longer completely blind, but I wouldn't put it past her to obscure the full extent of the truth if she felt it was an advantage to her."

"If her father's life is truly at risk, and I think between the library and Ron's father we can ascertain that fact enough to be comfortable in dealing with her, then I wouldn't see any reason for her to not be a capable partner," said Hermione, stroking her beaver.

Ron, noticing Hermione had successfully transfigured her piece of wood and Harry was not far behind, frustratingly jabbed his wand at the tree limb in front of him, managing to give it a beaver tail before setting it on fire. He swore before casting an extinguishing charm on it, putting out the fire and drawing the ire of the neighboring table of Hufflepuffs in the process.

"I was tempted to just let the damn thing burn," he grumbled. "What can we do Harry? Do we want to try and corner him?"

Hermione huffed out loud and Harry had to hold back a sigh. Ron's tenacity was an admirable trait most of the time, but his impetuousness would get the better of him someday. Hopefully it wouldn't be while fighting a Death Eater.

"Dumbledore wants him to incriminate himself. We need a reason to hold him and interrogate him. The Notts may not be the Malfoys, but they're still influential enough to put a stop to any inquiry based on flimsy evidence."

"Any ideas, Harry?" Hermione asked.

"Not yet," Harry said as the bell rang. "But I'm sure we'll figure something out soon, especially if he is up to something nefarious."

They packed up their things while Ron suggested myriad ways to have Theodore Nott incriminate himself. Most pertained to forcing him into another fight and getting him to admit he was the one who attacked Harry in the Great Hall. Harry had to admit that plan had merit. It was simple and if Nott was anything like Malfoy had a non-negligible chance of success. A Malfoy with an inferiority complex would be bragging at the slightest provocation and quick to draw his wand. Harry didn't want to brute force this if they didn't have to though. A more subtle approach would yield the best results and more Ministry buy-in. If Nott confessed his role in Malfoy's murder unprovoked, it would be a convincing display of a guilty conscience. If they tried to trick him into a fight it could be written off as a tense moment between two houses and any legal ramifications could be smoothed over with a bag of gold.

"Mr. Potter, would you stay behind for a moment?"

The stern voice of Minerva McGonagall stopped him dead at the door. Ron looked concerned and attempted to linger, forcing Hermione to pull him through the door. A wave of the professor's wand closed them in. It's not that he thought McGonagall was going to harm him in anyway but one on one meetings with the Transfiguration professor were rarely conducted for fun.

"Please have a seat, Mr. Potter," she said, gesturing to the chair in front of her. "Would you care for a biscuit?"

Harry sat down and took one, chewing on it for lack of anything better to do to defuse the tension in his body.

"Mr. Potter," she started, folding her hands in front of her. The usually composed Transfiguration professor seemed more at uneasy than he had ever seen her before. It took a moment for her to work out what she wanted to say. "It has come to my attention that you are working with the headmaster on something."

"How did you know?"

He thought he had been fairly discreet. More discreet than some of his other exploits were. No sneaking into professor's offices, no stealing from the store cupboards, not even many late night wanderings. He wondered how much she knew and how much resistance she would put up. He didn't want to bring the headmaster's name into it if he didn't have to and it was an important enough endeavor that he couldn't allow her to dissuade him from following through on it.

"Please give me some credit, Mr. Potter. We may have never developed much of a relationship, but I've been doing this long enough I can tell when a student of mine is preoccupied with something other than my lectures. I spoke with Professor Dumbledore and he did confirm you two were working on something important concerning the departed Mr. Malfoy and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named but said the details were up to you to share."

Harry was hesitant to impart this information upon McGonagall even though he felt she was one of the more trustworthy individuals in the castle. The fewer people who knew what was going on, the better. He opened his mouth to begin a vague overview of events before she waved him into silence.

"There is no need to say anything, Mr. Potter. I trust you and Professor Dumbledore have things well in hand," she sat back from the desk and looked at the wall of the classroom. A wistful look, out of place on her normally tightly composed face, appeared for a moment. "I want you to know if you do ever need anything from me, please do not hesitate to ask."

An uncomfortable silence settled over the two of them as Harry was not sure how to respond and McGonagall showed no sign of continuing to speak. The openness from the stern and reticent Transfiguration professor, a professor Harry had come to regard with a distant respect and little in way of emotion, caught him off guard. She must know more about what they're doing with regards to Malfoy than she was letting on. As the silence dragged on, he started to make a show of saying goodbye before she waved him back into his seat.

"I do not have many regrets in my academic career, but my inability to connect with students is one of them. You prime among them, Mr. Potter."

Harry wasn't sure how to respond to her. The uncharacteristic display of feeling left Harry off balance and uncomfortable, worried that apart from dealing with the Malfoy situation he'd need to determine whether the Transfiguration professor was acting under the influence of the Imperius Curse. He scratched the back of his neck and made a few unintelligible sounds, instead deferring to McGonagall to restart the conversation. Her voice carried a tremulous timbre he never heard before when next she spoke.

"I meant what I said last year during your career advice session. That was not meant solely to infuriate Dolores Umbridge. Even though last school year was far more taxing and dangerous than any of us could have imagined, that was no excuse. Going forward, Mr. Potter, I would like to meet with you semi-regularly. I daresay have a few tricks and bitis of wisdom I could pass on to you that would serve you well in your fight against He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named and in the years that come afterwards."

He still wasn't sure how to respond to this new McGonagall, the stoicism and distance replaced with warmth and generosity. He was in no place to refuse offers of help, though, and did not doubt the amount of knowledge available to her to impart on him.

"I would like that very much, Professor."

"I'm glad to hear that, Mr. Potter. Our time together at Hogwarts will soon come to an end and I do not want to let it slip through our fingers," she checked her watch. "Now, I must prepare for my next class and I imagine you have somewhere to be as well."

Harry nodded to her as her stern demeanor slipped back into place. He thought of lunch waiting for him in the Great Hall. Maybe this conversation would sit better on a full stomach. Hermione at least would be able to shed some light on her behavior. She was the only student he knew who spent so much time with the professors outside of class.

"Yes, Professor. And thank you," he said, impulsively sticking out his hand. He looked at and felt stupid with it sitting there in space between the two of them. Pale and clammy. He worried what she would think of this supposed defender of the light shaking with a pale and clammy hand. McGonagall grasped his hand and smiled tightly.

"I look forward to our time together, Mr. Potter. Please take care of yourself until then," she said, looking at him meaningfully. "It would _not_ be prudent to get in any direct confrontations if you can help it. It's always best to know what you're dealing with first."

"Of course not, Professor. I always take care."

She laughed. "Of course. Now off with you."

He turned and strolled out of the room nodding to student he recognized as his passed, but his only true companion the growling of his stomach. It wasn't until he got to the stairs leading down to the Great Hall that he was struck by the realization of what McGonagall had said. She definitely put the emphasis on _not_. He could see the look in her eyes and the tone in her voice. She knew. Or at least surmised. Maybe Dumbledore let her in on some of what was going on. After all it would not be the best for the school to let a potential murderer run around unchecked by those capable of stopping him. It was possible she also came to that conclusion herself when looking at the possible culprits. Either way, it further reassured Harry they were on the right track.

* * *

"You want us to do what?" Daphne asked, an incredulous look on her face as she surveyed the Invisibility Cloak in Harry's hand. "I do not want to leave my security to a blanket that may or may not cover our feet at all times. I gave you this information and agreed to come with you as I want to see the true perpetrator named, not because I'm willing to risk my life seeing justice done for Malfoy."

Harry stifled a retort, his ire raised by her referring to his only family heirloom and powerful magical object as a blanket, not wanting to a start an argument sure to attract attention in the middle of the night in the deserted Entrance Hall. He did not want to risk getting caught and risk alerting Nott and his crew that someone was potentially watching him. This was their best chance to find out what he was up to without resorting to more unsavory methods. If he did not want to be followed, maybe he shouldn't have been discussing his late night extra curriculars in the Slytherin Common Room. Limiting himself to only a sigh, he placed it over himself and ensured it covered all parts of his body. He asked her to cast a stunning spell at him.

"Are you sure about that, Potter?" Daphne responded, a hint of a smirk on her face as she fingered her wand and cast a stunner at him. The red light of the spell diffused across the area in which he stood. The shock on her face was visible.

"Where did you get that cloak?"

"My father. Why?"

"It's just that...I've heard...oh, never mind," she said and clambered underneath the cloak after Harry held it open for her. "Looks good to me. Keep your wand out though, Potter. Nott is volatile right now and it would not do to be caught off guard."

They started walking in silence towards the seventh floor, tense for reasons they were not quite sure of. Harry hadn't brought the map, keeping that trick hidden away from Daphne until it was absolutely needed, so he was walking a little more cautiously than he would normally. Daphne's head was moving back and forth, surveying the silent corridors they walked through. He was not sure if it was due to an abundance of caution or the novelty of stalking the halls of Hogwarts late at night. With how routine it was to him he sometimes forgot how walking around the castle at night was not commonplace for most of the residents. He preferred Hogwarts after dark, the halls all to himself, experiencing something so few other witches and wizards had an opportunity or desire to. He made a note that he needed to spend some more time trying to discover the castle's secrets before he left. He imagined Ron, Hermione and he yet barely scraped the scraped the surface. A millennia old magical castle had a life of its own, long term exposure to enchantments and magical residue manifested itself in odd ways, lending a sort of sentience to the objects in question. All of the quirks of the castle: disappearing door handles, trick steps, moving windows, were not attributable to a direct human action. They were all the castle's doing.

"Do you know where we are, Potter?" Daphne's whisper broke the silence. "I think we've gone up five flights of stairs, so we must be on the sixth floor. We need to get to the statue of Barnabas the Barmy. That's what I overheard Nott saying."

Barnabas the Barmy. He knew where they were going. The Room of Requirement. He must have heard about it from Malfoy. He lamented the fact that a place like that was entering into public awareness. Too many unsavory possibilities could be afford lilife by that room, one of which he was sure they were about to see tonight. They made it the rest of the way without incident but Daphne must have sense his tenseness, as they were both quiet and stiff as they reached the empty wall where Harry knew the Room was hidden.

"Here we are."

"Where exactly is 'here'?" she asked, looking blankly at the wall.

"Have you ever heard of the Room of Requirement?" Harry asked.

"Oh, is this the place where Malfoy discovered your little defense club last year? He went on about that for weeks. What exactly is it?" she responded.

"It's a room that gives you anything you want. I imagine Nott heard about it from Malfoy," he paced back and forth three times, asking the room to open up on Nott for him. Nothing happened, though this did not surprise Harry. "We need to figure out how to get inside."

Daphne stared at the blank wall. "Inside?"

"Yes. Inside. It'll create a room for you with whatever you need if you pace in front of the wall three times and think of what you want." He watched as Daphne walked back and forth with a look of concentration on her face. "What did you think of?"

She looked a bit sheepish. "I asked it to show us where Theodore Nott was."

Harry gave a half smile and pushed his hair back from his face. "I already tried that too. Malfoy was able to get in because that Edgecombe girl gave him the secret. It seems only someone on the inside or with knowledge of the contents of it can overcome what's keeping the person hidden inside."

They both stood in silence and stared at the wall. The only noise in the hallway was the sound of their breathing and the flickering of the torches as they considered what the room contained with Nott inside. They occasionally broke their vigil to pace back and forth in front of the wall, none of their ideas giving way to a door inside. Harry tried asking it several different ways to simply open for him, becoming more and more insistent and alluding to the importance of defeating Voldemort, as if the room was invested in the outcome of a human conflict. Each time he looked expectantly at the wall the cold stone stared back at him, letting him know time and again it did not care. A quarter hour later found him lying on the hard floor staring up at the ceiling his mind drifting from the task at hand to once again ponder how he ended up where he did. This time begging an inanimate magical object for help. A stifled cry of excitement sent him bolt upright.

"What is…?" His jaw dropped as he saw the door. "How did you…?"

Her face was shining with the first true smile he saw on it in all the time they spent together. It lent her green eyes a light they rarely had. "What did you ask it?"

"To let us in. Then when that failed, to help us defeat Voldemort."

She shuddered at the sound of the name. "Too Gryffindor, Potter. A noble request for a noble cause. You need to get inside the mind of Nott. Slytherin. Slytherins are ambitious and crafty, but there is an underlying fragility in many of them. Why do you think we're so obsessed with power?"

"So you asked the room for a way to power?"

"No, no, Harry. Not power for him. Nott was never high on the totem pole, even amongst the rest of the house, much less society at large. Power for someone else."

"Voldemort?"

She explained in detail how the Notts always came up short when it came to wealth and influence to families like the Malfoys and in prestige to families like the Zabinis and Bulstrodes. This would be their one opportunity to not gain power for themselves, no, they wouldn't want to risk falling lower than they already are. But the death of Draco and what seemed like a failure gave them an opening to the one last avenue available to improve their standing: the Dark Lord. Nott would have wanted to win his favor for himself and his family.

"So you asked the room to show you what Voldemort needed done?"

"That's what Nott would have asked it for."

"Doesn't seem very secure to me."

"Nott wouldn't care about that. He probably thought he was smarter than everyone else and would never need to worry about getting caught. He would have single minded focus on his goal. He isn't exactly the type to come on top in the smarts department either," she added as an afterthought. "Now come on, let's figure out what he's up to."

They pushed open the door as slowly as they could and stepped into a large dark room. It reminded him of the Department of Mysteries, the long room lit only by small, globe-shaped lamps lining the wall. He wondered if Nott was aware of what transpired there and Lucius Malfoy's failure. It might have been their initial inspiration for winning Voldemort's favor. The room appeared to be mostly empty, a few bookcases and trunks were scattered about the room and a large dark cabinet stood in the middle of the room. Two people were hunched down in front of it whispering to each other and sporadically tapping it with their wands. Harry assumed one was Theodore Nott but could only guess who the other was. He took a step forward and a floorboard creaked below his feet. Daphne grabbed his arm to prevent him moving forward further and pointed her wand at their feet. He looked at her questioningly and she pointed at their feet again, scuffing her toe against the floor. No sound emanated from it. Harry nodded at the silencing charm she placed upon them. He hadn't even thought to do that. With his still mediocre silent casting abilities he probably would have amplified the sound of their feet or at the very least started swearing in frustration. They crept closer on their now silent feet and moved within earshot of the conversation between the two.

"...you don't know that for sure, do you?" That was definitely the older Nott brother speaking.

"No," responded a slow, rumbling voice he did not recognize. "But I think it will work. It's worth a try at least, isn't it?"

"I suppose," responded Nott in his thin, reedy voice that grated on Harry's ears. "As long as you don't make it worse."

"I don't think it could get any worse," responded the other voice, who started whispering a complex incantation and rhythmically tapping his wand on the cabinet. Harry still didn't recognize the voice and crept closer, trying to get a closer look at the other individual and the object they were working on. Daphne grabbed his arm. The look on her face, at least what Harry could see of it, spoke to her uncertainty, bordering on fear. Harry understood that look. He knew it all too well, but after encountering Voldemort more times than he could count on one hand he found it hard to be worried about Nott and his sidekick.

The person stopped tapping and opened up the door, putting something inside. He shut it for a second and opened the door again. Nothing changed. He swore softly. "Didn't work."

Nott snorted. "Doesn't surprise me." He checked his watch. "I think it's about time we wrap up for the evening. It's getting late and we don't want Snape snooping after us again. I swear, sometimes it's almost like he doesn't want us helping the Dark Lord."

The other individual grunted in agreement and started to back away towards the door unbeknownst to Harry and Daphne, who, in their eagerness to get a closer look at the cabinet, did not realize how close they had become to the two of them. Before either of them realized what was happening he backed right into the two of them, tripping against the invisible misshapen object that was Harry and Daphne. The cloak did not slide off them but they knew they were in trouble. He jumped up and looked wildly about the room, his face visible to them for the first time. Crabbe.

Nott laughed. "Watch it there you oaf. Don't want you tripping on the cabinet and breaking it agian."

Crabbe's face was red and wand was held out in front of him. "Quiet! I definitely ran into something. It felt like a person."

Nott drew his wand as well even though the look on his face indicated he was still quite skeptical. "How sure are you, Crabbe?"

"More than usual. What's that spell again for showing humans? Homonum revelsomething _?"_

Daphne and Harry looked at each other and took off running at the same moment Nott cast _homenum revelio_. He wasn't sure if it was the spell or their running feet now visible underneath the cloak that alerted Nott and Crabbe to their location, but they had to duck two stunning spells all the same. The two started to chase after them and if it were not for a well aimed tripping jinx from Daphne they may have succumbed to one of the more dangerous looking spells while trying to get through the door that came their way. Daphne sealed the door and Harry conjured a huge boulder in front of the threshold. He had never been able to accomplish one of that size before with Dumbledore, who was quite fond of the spell. Never know when a big rock will come in handy.

"Impressive, Potter," Daphne whispered as they caught their breath.

He could hear Nott and Crabbe on the other side of the door. It would only be a moment before the door was open and even though the boulder would keep them busy for at least a few minutes, it would not do to let them hear their voices. Dispensing with the cloak and tucking his wand into his jeans, he took off at a fast jog, trying to put as much space between the two of them and Nott and Crabbe. Daphne kept pace right beside him. Fortune smiled on them as they made it several floors down without encountering anyone or anything before Harry pulled them into an alcove. His mind betrayed him at this moment, the heat of Daphne's body and the rise and fall of her chest from exertion catching more attention than he would like.

"Since when can Crabbe string a sentence together, much less perform complex magic on what I assume is a powerfully enchanted object?"

"He's always been good at charms. And when Malfoy isn't around he reads quite a lot. Obviously still trying to ingratiate himself with someone close to the Dark Lord if he's willing to help out Nott. What do you think that was?"

"A cabinet," Harry responded. "I'm not sure what it does, but it seemed familiar. I'll have to see if I can remember where it came from." He checked his watch. "You should probably get down to your dormitory before Nott gets back. I wouldn't be surprised to see him sneaking past here in a few minutes."

"You're right. We'll discuss this on Saturday," she smiled and put her hand on his arm for a second as she walked passed. "Think about ways to put Nott away once and for all. Maybe your old pal Dumbledore can help us out."

She was quickly swallowed up by the darkness of the corridor, a wave of her wand snuffing out the torches, the sound of her footsteps disappeared soon afterwards. He threw the cloak back over himself and trudged up to Gryffindor Tower, ignoring the admonishments of the Fat Lady as he made his way up to bed. Ron was asleep so he wouldn't need to explain anything tonight. They hadn't come any closer to solving Malfoy's death but it was clear Nott was working inside the school to help Voldemort, probably taking over for Malfoy. That alone would be enough to bring him in. After that, the only thing left was the easy part. Or so he hoped.

* * *

 **A/N:** Things are starting to get hot now. Thanks for reading!


	7. VII

**VII**

Harry found himself outside a few evenings later with Ron, Hermione, and Hagrid, walking along the edge of the Forbidden Forest. Hagrid approached them after lunch earlier that day saying he needed some help looking for wild mushrooms at the edge of the forest, though after only a few minutes into their search, where Hagrid was already throwing mushrooms into his bucket by the handful and didn't even tell them what the ones they were looking for looked like, it was clear he only wanted a visit. Harry felt a twinge of guilt. Only now did he realize they hadn't gone to see Hagrid for the better part of six weeks, not since Malfoy's death.

"What are we collecting these for?" asked Hermione, throwing one in the bucket. "These don't look like any mushroom I've eaten."

"Course not," said Hagrid, dropping a few more in the bucket. "Eat one of these and you'd be deader than a doornail you would. In fact, best you lot not touch any of them. I'm fine with me giant's blood but I'm not sure if they're poisonous to the touch," he frowned and scratched his beard. "Probably should have checked that first."

Hermione, ever prepared, pulled a pair of dragon hide gloves from her robes and continued combing through the brush, managing to pull up a single small mushroom, a triumphant look on her face. Hagrid looked at her and said, "Nice find Hermione," before throwing another fistful of dinner plate sized fungi into his bucket.

Ron and Harry looked at each other and shrugged, walking along the edge of the woods with the other two but making little more than cursory efforts to find the fungi, enjoying the waning hours of the late autumn sun, warming their faces in a way it would not in the coming months. The Scottish winters were made even colder by the threat looming beyond the castle's walls.

After about twenty minutes Hagrid stood up and wiped the sweat from his forehead. "That'll about do it I reckon. Take too many and they'll go bad before Professor Snape can use them all. You can come outta there, Hermione!" he called to her, noticing she had wandered a ways into the trees. "Truth be told I didn't need your help," he said to Harry and Ron, a sheepish smile on his face. "Haven't seen you lot since the first week of school though. Wanted to see how you were doing."

"We've been alright, Hagrid," said Ron. "We've been meaning to visit with you, honest, it's just been busy with classes and homework and…"

"Malfoy's death?" he said, taking in the look the two shared before continuing. "Yeah, I figured you were trying to do something about that. Isn't hardly nothing that goes on in this school you three don't get involved in is there?"

"Dumbledore wanted…" said Harry, before Hagrid cut him off.

"Say no more, Harry," replied Hagrid, patting him on the shoulder with enough force to knock him off balance. "If Dumbledore is involved that's good enough for me. You lot also know how I am with secrets," he said with a smile. "But if there's anything I can do for you, be sure to let me know, alright now?"

They talked idly for a few minutes about school and Quidditch, with Hagrid and Ron slipping into their usual argument regarding the Chudley Cannon's chances. _'You're out of your damn mind, Weasley.'_ Harry, having heard Ron list the same dozen or so reasons at least once a month over the past five years why this year was finally the Cannons' year lost interest and noticed Hermione had not yet returned. He was able to slip away unnoticed from the pair and made his way over to where they last spotted her. Taking his wand out as a precaution, he said her name once. No response. It wasn't like Hermione to stray so far. He said her name slightly louder and sighed in relief when she heard her respond. He noticed her waving a few hundred yards into the forest. Lighting his wand in the growing gloom, he made her way over to her.

"What are you doing so far in here?" he asked.

"Well first I was looking for those damn mushrooms," she said breathlessly. "But then this caught my attention. The sun was just low enough in the horizon to reflect off the buttons." She held up what looked like a slightly tattered cloak, the gold buttons testifying to the wealth of its owner. "And there was this not far from the cloak."

He took the thin piece of wood from her hand. "A wand? Why would it be out here? I wonder whose it is? It looks a little familiar," he said, holding it up to the light of his wand.

"Of course it would. It's Malfoy's. We've had it pointed at us enough. And I remember the gold inlay around the handle from when he held it on us in Umbridge's office last year. Did Dumbledore ever mention anything about his wand?"

"No. I don't think it ever came up. I wonder how it ended up in the forest?" Harry asked.

"I can't see Malfoy willingly throwing his wand away into the trees, can you?"

"Nott?"

Hermione nodded. "I don't know why it would be anyone else. Come on, it's getting dark. Let's get back to the castle before anyone other than Ron or Hagrid see us coming out of here. Dumbledore might be able to glean some more information from it."

They made their way out of the forest and true to form, Ron and Hagrid had not noticed them missing. "All good there, Hermione?" Hagrid asked.

She threw a few more mushrooms in the bucket. "I am! This is actually fun. We'd love to help out again, wouldn't we you two?"

Ron and Harry both nodded and Hagrid smiled. "It's getting late, why don't you three get up to the castle before it gets dark?"

They said their goodbyes and walked across the quickly darkening lawn, making it back to the front doors just as the sun slipped below the horizon. Back in the common room, Ron talked Hermione into a game of chess after Harry begged off due to a Transfiguration essay he left until the last minute. Hermione, exasperated both by Harry's procrastination and Ron's incessant asking, gave in only reluctantly. Harry stared at the piece of parchment in front of him, thinking not of Gamp's Law but of the wand in his pocket, was deaf to the noise of Ron and Hermione's bickering over chess and the general din of an evening in the Gryffindor Common Room. He ran his finger along the cold wood in his pocket. Six weeks since it cast its last spell. Six weeks since its master had died. How had it ended up in the forest? If they could answer that question, maybe they could answer how its master had met his end.

* * *

"Tea, Harry?" asked Professor Dumbledore, gesturing to the chipped, white tea pot in his hands. It was not the first time Harry wondered why someone with his reputation, and most likely, wealth, used such a careworn item.

"Yes. Thank you, sir."

Harry found himself here the night after they found the wand, wanting to turn it over to Dumbledore as soon as possible. It was not often an urgent matter forced them to reschedule their normal appointment, but the headmaster seemed in no hurry to begin even after Harry related the story of his and Daphne's escape from Nott and Crabbe as well as how they came upon Malfoy's wand in the forest. The two sipped their tea in silence for a few moments, Dumbledore surveying the wand lying on the desk between the two them and Harry examining Dumbledore examine the wand. He seemed reluctant to touch it, having not laid a finger on it after Harry placed it on the desk. Why he would avoid touching it was beyond Harry. It's not as if there was any sort of contamination to avoid. He, Hermione, and who know who else had touched it in the intervening weeks. Not to mention the Forbidden Forest was full of ambient magic. Finally, Dumbledore broke his vigil.

"You may be wondering why I am reluctant to pick up this wand, Harry. I can assure you I have not lost my mind. It is as intact as ever," he sighed, slumping in his seat for the first time Harry could recall. "I have been headmaster for over thirty years, Harry. And a student has never died in my tenure," he smiled slightly, despite the macabre conversation. "That may not sound like much, but I can assure you it was once a common occurrence at this school. Mr. Malfoy was not a wonderful child by any stretch of the imagination and it has always been difficult choice to allow the children of Death Eaters to remain at this school, especially during the most dangerous periods. It has always been my hope in time they would find redemption," he sat up and picked up the wand, looking at it under the continued with a faraway look on his face. "Time ran out for Draco Malfoy."

Dumbledore's obvious despair over the loss of Malfoy was enough to force Harry to swallow whatever negative retort he had. He would not mourn for Draco Malfoy, regardless of how much guilt Dumbledore expressed over his loss. Malfoy was an arrogant, spiteful, and bigoted young man who, in Harry's opinion, failed to make any positive contributions to society while he was a living member of it and only lasting impact would be his leaving it. Dumbledore saw the innocent teenager, corrupted by his family and their place in the world, not yet beyond the reach of the light. To Harry and his friends he was an insecure and spiteful adolescent, taking the slightest opportunity to belittle or even physically harm them as recompense for slights, real and imagined. Even so, this did not mean he deserved to die. He agreed with Dumbledore on that account.

Dumbledore continued speaking after a moment's contemplation. "I have given my life to this school, Harry. This school and those who reside in it. I'm aware there was no love lost between yourself and Mr. Malfoy and I tend to agree that of all the individuals one can aspire to emulate, he was not among the best examples. I fear Mr. Nott has gone even further down this path than Mr. Malfoy. No one person is perfect, but I believe no one is beyond helping. Beyond seeing the error of their ways and choosing to reset their lives along a brighter path," he sighed, looking out the window at the grounds fading in the dim evening light. He did that more and more in their recent meetings. "I have to believe that is true. Even for Tom Riddle."

Harry did not share his optimism. "Surely you can't…"

Dumbledore raised his hand and spoke gently and firmly. "Enough, Harry. Let us not arge. We are not here tonight to debate the merits of morality and our beliefs on human nature. I believe it is best we act fast on the knowledge we have of Mr. Nott and his activities, wouldn't you agree?"

"Yes, sir. We don't want him hurting anyone else. Or succeeding with whatever he's doing for Voldemort."

"I agree quite strongly. What do you think we should do, Harry?"

Harry paused before he spoke. The scenarios he discussed with Ron and Hermione running through his head, each more convoluted and full of potential problems than the last. They were so accustomed to sneaking around and avoiding suspicion it seemed they were incapable of coming up with anything straightforward. Discarding these ideas and their potential pitfalls, he said to Dumbledore, "I think we should go right after him. We know where he goes, what he does, and thanks to Daphne, when he is doing it. After our near escape last time I'd guess he knows somebody might be onto him so we'll want to go after him before he moves what he's working on and undoes months of our work."

"I agree, Harry." Harry's surprise towards Dumbledore's ready acquiescence must have shown on his face for Dumbledore chuckled before continuing. "You're surprised I agree so readily to this plan when I normally counsel patience? Despite my reputation as a schemer, Harry, I too can recognize when it is time for action. This is a time for action. You recall how to send a message by Patronus?"

"Yes, sir."

"Excellent. Please send me a message when you begin following him and then again when you are ready to confront him. I will then come post-haste to assist. Hopefully we will be able to convince him to surrender quietly but if the worst should happen I do not doubt we can subdue him through the force of our combined efforts."

Harry hesitated for a second. "Do you think he really did it, headmaster?"

He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes for a moment. These past few weeks were the oldest and most tired Harry could ever remember the centenarian appearing. Dumbledore was always a person full of life, his energy and spark amazing Harry who, even as a teenager, sometimes felt he could not match the professor's verve. The magic that so sustained the professor and filled those around him with the same energy and wonder at the world seemed to have dissipated since Malfoy's demise. Harry knew that even if they brought his killer to justice it would not be enough to revive Dumbledore's spirit completely. At the very least he hoped it would provide a salve for the worst of the damage. They would need him for the fight ahead.

"I think so, Mr. Potter. I have confirmed the information you've provided to me with that of Severus and sources outside the school as well as some of my own suppositions. I believe, with a high probability, of his involvement in this matter. If it ends up being that he did not cast the fatal blow, it is still likely he can lead us to the one responsible. Yes, Mr. Potter. I believe it is far past time we wrote the end of this story."

Dumbledore's confidence in this outcome put Harry's mind at ease. He often felt as though they were crawling along in the dark, striking out at whatever was most convenient, the thing nearest at hand to the lead them out of the darkness. Dumbledore believing Nott was the killer, or at least possessed intimate knowledge of the event, was enough to assuage Harry's doubts. He would head up to the Owlery right after their meeting to send Daphne a late night note. It was time to end this. It was time for justice, what little justice he deserved, for Draco Malfoy.

"I hope the next time we see each other will be at the arrest of Theodore Nott," said Harry, rising to leave.

"I agree, Mr. Potter." There the headmaster was, once again looking out the window, slumped in his chair. "It is time to be done with this."

He said his good night and left the headmaster in that position. Harry wished he could feel the pain the headmaster did, to find a reason to be as impacted by Malfoy's death as he was. He could not though. To him, this was a matter of saving the school from Voldemort and his followers, maybe helping their quest to rid the world of Voldemort in the process. The headmaster did not know Malfoy like he did. He saw a person to be redeemed and not the boy who spent over five years spreading fear and bigotry among the students of Hogwarts. He did not deserve to die, but he did not deserve their pity or grief.

Reaching the Owlery he scribbled a quick note to Daphne letting her know it was time to go after Nott and to contact him as soon as he made it apparent he was going on another of his late night wanderings. Looking out at the moonlight grounds of Hogwarts from the open wall of the Owlery, he took a deep breath of the cold night air. He felt it in his chest, the way he imagined Malfoy's chest felt as the poison took him. He would not mourn Draco Malfoy but he would avenge him.

* * *

"Damn it, Harry. We're coming with you and that's final," said Ron, arms akimbo in front of the portrait hole. Harry didn't want to fight them but didn't really want them to come. The last thing he needed was them to lose the element of surprise by arguing with Daphne.

"We won't say anything to Greengrass, Harry," said Hermione, placing a hand on Ron's shoulder who relaxed at the touch. "We've been through so much, though, Harry. Wouldn't you feel more comfortable with us covering your back?"

The truth was he didn't think it would make a difference having the two of them there other than making their approach more apparent to anyone watching, but he didn't have the heart to say no. This was the first situation he found himself tangled up in where Ron and Hermione were relegated to bystander status and not active participants alongside him and could tell they did not want to let him on his own any longer. As long as they hung back with the Invisibility Cloak they shouldn't do any harm.

"If you two are willing to stay covered under the cloak when we go in, you can come. Dumbledore will be by shortly afterwards. You'll ensure nobody sneaks up on us while we're in there. Who knows who else he's dragged into his scheme at this point?"

The relieved looks on their faces made Harry feel better than he wanted to admit. He knew Daphne deserved this and the safety it would provide her family as much as he wanted to see another of Voldemort's supporters locked up in Azkaban and didn't want Ron and Hermione wandering into a situation they didn't truly understand. He knew Hermione was right though. It wouldn't be the same without the two of them there and they could provide valuable help. Too much time spent with Daphne, trying to do everything alone.

"Sounds good, mate. That's what we were suggesting we'd do anyway, wasn't it, Hermione?" he asked her, with what he thought was a subtle glance, despite it being written all over his face.

Hermione rolled her eyes. "Yes, Ron. That's what we were going to suggest."

Harry checked his watch. They'd need to hurry down to the Entrance Hall to make sure they wouldn't miss Daphne. She said ten o'clock exactly and he wouldn't put it past her to leave without him. He gestured to the two of them and they clambered through the portrait hole. They made their way through the corridors as they normally would, curfew not until eleven and the three of them out after nine on a mid-week night not an unusual sight at all. Their inane chatter belied the tension they all felt. Not unaccustomed to unusual or dangerous situations, this would be the first time walking into one where they felt they knew what to expect and planned for it. Harry thought this would be better, having walked through the plan with Dumbledore, with Ron and Hermione earlier that evening, and then would again with Daphne as they made their way to the fourth floor corridor that night. They had no idea what Nott was capable of, and that single flaw was proving to worry Harry more than any other encounter with danger had over the last few years. Usually they had the flow of adrenaline to counteract their fears and anxiety over the unknown and to fuel their improvisation. Now he had none of that, only the worry that something would go wrong or they didn't account for a crucial detail.

"Where are we supposed to meet her?" asked Ron, as they descended into the Great Hall.

"Just in the Entrance Hall," Harry said, leading them to the doors that would open to it. He checked his watch. "It's just turned ten now, so she should be there."

He opened the doors and lit his wand, the flickering of the torches only enough to light the thresholds and not the chamber. The good news was that the room did not contain any bystanders. The bad news was that it did not contain Daphne Greengrass. He quietly said her name. No response. He was filled with dread. Things were already not going to plan.

"She's not here, is she?"

Harry responded, an edge present in his voice that was not a moment ago. "No, I don't think she is."

"What do you want to do, Harry?" asked Hermione, clearly anxious.

He took out his wand and sent a message to Dumbledore, letting them know they were about to begin making their way to the Room of Requirement. He took a deep breath and nodded to himself. The brief appearance of Prongs reassured had reassured Harry. This had gone on long enough and it was time to put an end to it.

"Let's go. We were a few minutes late so Daphne may have already started to make her way up there. Even if she got cold feet this shouldn't be anything we can't handle."

He turned and led them two of them out of the Entrance Hall and back up the stairs, the corridors silent except for their footsteps and breathing, which grew progressively heavier as they climbed. Their shadows flickered in the torchlight, giving the whole situation an eerie feeling. They did not speak and moved with purpose, not looking back. They didn't encounter anyone else on their way up, which, while not entirely unusual occurrence for being out and about this time of night, did not put their minds at ease.

Harry wondered what would come after this. Even after they captured Nott, there was no telling how much he'd talk, and even if he did talk there was no guarantee the Wizengamot would use that evidence to find him guilty. If they did send him away, there was no guarantee as to what would happen next. Presumably Voldemort would come up with some other plan using some other willing individual to strike at Hogwarts and Dumbledore. Nott's arrest and imprisonment was only a small speed bump, if one at all. He didn't imagine that Voldemort was pinning all his hopes on this one scheme run by a teenager, and in fact, the loss of this one may provoke him to set something much more terrible in motion. All of that aside, he could not be allowed to run amok in the school any longer. Too many innocent, mostly defenseless lives were at stake. At the very least they would be safe for a while longer.

"Harry," asked Hermione, coming to a stop as they neared the Room of Requirement. "Does that seem strange to you?"

A red tapestry was crumpled on the ground, the broken rod and rope from which it hung indicating it was done in a moment of haste. Harry didn't think it was the first time a tapestry experienced damage, after all a castle fell of teenagers with burgeoning skills in magic had to result in a few casualties over the years, but he had never actually seen one. That must mean the elves didn't yet have a chance to repair and re-hang this one. It was strange, seeing something out of place in the usually well-ordered castle. The only time he could recall something being off-kilter was the direct result of a magical accident or some sort of scuffle, put back in order quickly and efficiently before anyone was the wiser. It was disquieting seeing the tapestry laying on the stone cold floor, a crumpled mess so close to their final destination. Something wasn't right.

"Something is wrong, isn't it?" asked Ron.

"Probably," Harry acknowledged. He sent off Prongs once again, alerting Dumbledore to the fact they arrived at their final destination. "Let's go."

They all held their wands at the ready as they passed through the final few hallways to the wall which behind lay what they sought. They approached cautiously, the tips of their wands alight to illuminate the entire corridor, the torches always leaving behind shadows and darkened corners where something could hide. Their wands lit up a shapeless piece of cloth at the base of the wall, the second time in as many minutes they came upon something out of place. Suddenly the fabric jumped into the air and Harry nearly blasted it into pieces until he noticed Hermione was the one levitating it, presumably checking to make sure it was not enchanted nor hiding something that was so. She nodded to the two of them and let it fall to the ground. Harry picked it up. It was a piece of a student's robe and bore a Slytherin crest. He handed it wordlessly to Ron who also passed it to Hermione.

"Do you think…?" Ron asked, nervously fingering his wand.

Harry nodded and took a deep breath, walking back and forth three times asking for a place to help the Dark Lord. Just thinking it made him uncomfortable, but apparently the Room of Requirement did not require one to feel particularly strongly about their request and the door appeared all the same. Assuming Daphne was in there complicated things. They wouldn't know what kind of danger she was in or how she was being held. How many people were in there besides Nott? He had seen enough of Daphne and the measure of her skills well enough that he knew the only way two of them, assuming Crabbe was still working with Nott, could take her without raising concern was by catching her completely unawares and Harry figured that would be difficult if she was ready for the two of them. He was prepared for the worst. Handing Hermione his cloak, he also shed his robes and cast them aside, leaving him jeans and a plain blue shirt. It was time for the Wizarding World to be done with robes once and for all, he thought distractedly for a second.

"I don't think there's any need for the two of you to hide under that while you wait for Dumbledore. I hope he gets here soon."

"Are you sure you don't want us coming with you mate?" asked Ron, paler than usual. "Couldn't you use some support?"

Harry put his hand on his shoulder. "No, Ron. It's best if it's just me at first. It's going to be tight quarters and I don't want us running into each other in the dark. Dumbledore and I talked this through and it's best if I go in alone. I'll blast the door open if I get into trouble."

Hermione's voice trembled when she wished him luck, comforting Harry by reaffirming his earlier thoughts it was more worrisome to walk into a situation where they planned for than one they did not. Their approach was already in shambles and he was trying his best to stick to it despite not knowing what he was about to encounter.

"I'll see you guys in a few minutes," he said with a pained smile, turning and pushing open the door.

 **A/N** : We're just about at the endgame now. Two chapters left. Thanks for reading!


	8. VIII

**VIII**

Harry immediately opened his eyes wide, the complete darkness of the room taking him by surprise. He went into a low crouch and held his wand out in front of him, ready to retaliate in case someone on the opposite end of the room, presumably more prepared for the darkness than he was, tried to take him while he was off guard. He sat for a few minutes, steadying his breathing and waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. This proved fruitless as there was no light in the room to let his eyes adjust to. There was no sound and it didn't seem as they were in a hurry. That was fine with him, he could just wait until Dumbledore got there and he'd take care of it before any of them would blink an eye. Apparently, someone had the same idea as he did because a stunning spell, or at least a red beam of light he hoped was a stunner, sped through the darkness and forced him to the floor.

He crawled over to a wall and stayed at the base of it for a moment, collecting his thoughts. Based off how far he traveled and the general feel of the room, he assumed it was the same one he saw with Daphne a few nights ago, which meant there was not much space for him to hide in. He wondered if he would simply be able to crawl to the other side of the room and take them by surprise, but another barrage of stunning spells, one which came close to his excuse for a hiding spot, disabused him of this notion. He had no desire to be a sitting duck and they seemed perfectly content to sit in the darkness and launch spells until they hit him. They'd have to figure out how to get past Dumbledore, but with the cover provided to them by the darkened room, they could afford to tackle one problem at a time.

He cast a Disillusionment Charm on himself and started to crawl slowly towards where he believed the opposite end of the room to be. As he moved he started to hear the murmur of voices casting spells and speaking to each other, though he could not yet make out what they were saying. The direction of the spells, steadily moving from the red of the stunning spell to more malevolent looking greens and purples were still aimed at the end of the room he vacated, urging him to move quicker before they widened the radius of their fire. He kept the right side of his body pressed firmly against the cold stone as he dragged himself forward, willing himself to stay silent. He wasn't sure if it the sound of his heart pumping in his ears or the room complying with his wishes that kept him quiet. Either way he made it the rest of the way without incident, none too soon it turned out, as the spellcasting started to trail along sections of the wall he recently vacated.

Hearing frustrated grunting and the growing frustration in their voices, now close enough to hear they were mostly cursing and mumbling to themselves, saying nothing of value, he took a deep breath and readied himself to act. He aimed his wand at the opposite wall and cast a bludgeoning curse, drawing his assailants attention away from him and quickly followed up with a _Lumos_ and a pair of disarming charms once he caught enough of them in the beam of light to see where he was aiming. Acting on a hunch, he whispered _'Accio Daphne's Wand',_ bringing her wand clattering along the floor to him. He ducked as another spell flew towards his head and fired off another string of stunning spells with his next opening. A thump signaled to him that one of them had landed and stilled his assailants for the time being. With a wave of his wand he lit the torches in the room and surveyed the state of things.

"Daphne?" he asked, after checking to make sure both Nott and Crabbe were unconscious. "Are you okay?"

She was laying on the floor, a black handkerchief wrapped around her mouth. Her blonde hair was fanned around her, as if she had been carelessly tossed to the floor. He crouched down and was relieved to see she was still breathing. A dark purple and red welt on her temple, disappearing into her hairline, indicated a simple _Ennervate_ wouldn't be enough and he'd have to wait for their old friend time to bring her back around. He kicked Crabbe and Nott's wands into the corner of the room and bound their hands with the roughest rope he could conjure and woke them from their unconscious state, blindfolding them with a wave of his wand immediately after they opened their eyes.

"What have you done to us, Potter?" Nott said in a high-pitched voice, rolling around on the ground working at the bonds on his wrist.

"Don't worry, Nott. You're not blind," Harry said. He created a chair and sat down, resting comfortably in a chintz chair modeled on the ones Dumbledore was so fond of. It was the only one he taught him. _'No point in being uncomfortable while you're sitting, life is uncomfortable standing.'_ He looked at the three Slytherins, two bound and blindfolded, the other unconscious, and smiled sadly. Wasn't that the truth.

"What do you want from us?" Crabbe said quietly. It was the first time Harry could recall hearing him speak and was surprised how soft his voice was.

"Just a little chat among fellow Hogwarts students," Harry said, tapping his palm with his wand. "It's about time we got to know each other a bit better, wouldn't you agree?"

They both retained a resolute silence that Harry let hang in the air. Truth be told, he wasn't quite sure how he wanted to handle this conversation. He could wait for Dumbledore, but part of him wanted to hear what they had to say for themselves first. He and Daphne had been the ones who put themselves at risk for this information and a part of him felt that he and Daphne, if she came to soon, should be the ones to hear the confession. He looked at the two of them on the ground, the short and slight Nott, his mousy brown hair refusing to shine even in the bright torchlight, and the hulking Crabbe, his face blank, large hands hanging loosely in front of him where they were knotted together. Another few teenagers lost to this war.

"How did you get Daphne up here?" Harry asked, prodding Nott with his wand, in a brief moment of vindictiveness.

"It was easy," Nott said, perking up at his chance to relate the events. "We intercepted that letter Weasley sent to his father last week and knew she was onto us for some reason. We set my brother up in an empty classroom down the corridor from the common room after dinner and told him to watch for Greengrass. Sure enough, she came strolling by a few minutes after Crabbe and I. Greg got her with a stunner and I cast the Imperius on her to get her to follow. Bitch fought it off once, but we wore her down before too long."

"Where is your brother now?" Harry asked.

"Common room. I wasn't supposed to tell him what we're doing for the Dark Lord…" Nott stopped talking abruptly.

There it was. Nott, uncoerced, confirming he was working for Voldemort. Harry smiled for what felt like the first time in several weeks. The weight that had been pressing down on his shoulders began to lessen as soon as he heard that. The light was at the end of the tunnel. He summoned Crabbe and Nott's wands to him and waited for a minute more. They were both slumped over even more than they had been. An impressive feat considering they were laying on the ground.

"What is it you were doing for Voldemort, Theodore?"

"Why would I tell you that?"

A cornered animal never thought rationally. "Because you're going to say one way or another and I can guarantee you'd rather tell Dumbledore and I then wait for Scrimgeour's interrogators to get it out of you."

He was quiet for a minute, so quiet Harry wasn't sure if he was even breathing, trying to suffocate himself to death maybe. He pressed his foot into Nott's stomach until he started coughing, reassuring himself that he was, in fact, not trying to hold his breath until he died. The silence stretched on and made Harry uneasy. Harry didn't anticipate Nott accepting his fate so readily.

"Nothing to say, Theodore?"

"Not to you."

"Crabbe?" Harry asked, stepping over and crouching down next to the larger boy. He leaned close to his ear and whispered, "Anything you want to share? If you're honest with us and display real remorse, I'm sure we could work something out. A better deal then your friend, anyway."

Crabbe mumbled unintelligibly and then went silent. Harry glanced over at Daphne, hoping she was close to regaining consciousness. He had a feeling she would be good at this interrogation stuff. He conjured a bucket of water to dump on her head and was levitating it over her when he heard a door slam and everything went dark. He couldn't see his hand in front of his face. The only sound that made it through was the crashing of the bucket and the sloshing of its contents on the floor, but a coughing fit from that direction made it seem as though his gambit was successful. A new voice he did not recognize entered the room. Harry, at a loss for better options, brought up his wand and started casting a series of light and vanishing spells, attempting to do something about the darkness. His failure to produce any light or clarity led him to believe Nott may have gotten his hands on some of Fred and George's Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder. Increasingly frustrated at his own ineffectualness and angry at Fred and George, his spells became increasingly powerful and erratic. His bursts of flame started to burn away some of the darkness, but a spell whizzing over his head sent him crashing to the floor. Realizing it was well past the time Dumbledore should have shown up, he bit back a groan. He had never told Ron and Hermione how to get through into the room.

"What the hell is going on in here, Nott?" said the voice, a man's, deep and raspy. The room was still filled with a thick haze, but Harry was able to make out the newcomer's stout form standing by the cabinet. "You didn't say nothin' about it being so dark."

"Shut up, Mulciber," said Nott, his voice further away from Harry than he thought it should be. "Where are the others?"

Harry didn't like the sound of that word, as he had only one guess who the 'others' would be. The only thing that had been in the room besides the four of them was the cabinet. He needed to destroy it before anyone else came through. He brought up his wand and started firing off bludgeoning curses, hoping to land one on the cabinet. He heard a grunt from Mulciber as he dove out of the way, but no splintering sounds..

"Potter? Harry?" said Daphne's voice, making its way through the thick, but steadily clearing fog. Her ordeal seemed to have sapped much of her usual edge away, as the only other time he could recall her sounding this vulnerable was their meeting by the lake. "Do you have my wand?"

"Yes," he said. "Are you alright?"

"Mostly. I'm laying right behind the cabinet, so if you can get me my wand I can blast a hole through it."

This set off a frenzy of activity. Mulciber, who Harry had not managed to disarm, was firing off curses in every direction, from the obvious red of stunning spells to the all too familiar purples and greens. Harry had seen enough of the darker side of magic for one night. He whispered Daphne's name again and walked on his haunches towards the sound of her voice. He almost tripped over her legs in the darkness but managed to get her wand back to her.

He leaned close to her and said in the quietest voice he could manage, "I'm going to come up firing, hopefully the influx of magic will displace enough powder to clear the rest of the room. Once Mulciber starts training his spells in my direction let loose on the cabinet. Hopefully we can get it destroyed before anyone else comes through and we have a real mess on our hands."

Harry could see her nod, her blonde hair and pale appearing gray in the low light, but her blue eyes shined through. "Be careful, Harry."

"You too."

He turned around and made his way across the room, clear of Daphne and the two Slytherin males still bound on the ground. Nott's high pitched voice grated on him as he moved for better positioning. Crabbe was silent. Harry hoped he wasn't dead as Mulciber didn't seem too concerned about who he hit with what. His hand touched cool stone and he decided this was as good a place as any. It wouldn't be the first time his back was against the wall. A dull knocking sound emanated from where Daphne was laying. It seemed the cabinet had some ability to absorb magic, but couldn't imagine it being imbued with enough magic to hold off bludgeoning curses indefinitely.

Mulciber launched a spell towards Daphne, forcing her to curl into a fetal position. No time like the present. He started casting _Expelliarmus_ in as rapid a succession as possible, trying to both hit Mulciber and give Daphne the window she needed. He ducked to avoid a spell and knew Mulciber had seen enough to get an idea of his position. Hoping Daphne would blast the cabinet apart soon he redoubled his efforts, the magic swirling through the space clearing away the last of the darkness powder. Giving his eyes a moment to adjust to the normal light levels, he disillusioned himself, wanting to prevent Mulciber seeing him before he saw him.

A crack signaled that Daphne had finally landed one on the cabinet, tearing off one of its legs and sending it spinning into the corner. A second punched a clean hole directly through it. He could see Mulciber turn towards her and raise his wand.

" _Avada…_ "

He didn't get a chance to finish, as Harry's stunning spell caught him full in the side and blasted him into the wall, where he fell and lay crumpled at the base of it, blood coming out of his ear. Harry walked over to him, picked up and snapped his wand, glancing only briefly at Mulciber's lifeless form. He wasn't sure if he was dead or not and didn't want to find out at the moment. His jaw was slack and eyes closed, head propped at an odd angle against the hard stone wall. The blood around his ear seemed to be only a small amount, so Harry took heart that it he may just be unconscious. He turned away before he was sick. There was still two conscious Death Eaters in the room and the cavalry's arrival was not guaranteed.

"Alright, Theodore," he said, walking back over to him and sitting down on his haunches, close to his face. "I don't think either of us want to be here anymore. I have just one more question for you. Did you kill Draco Malfoy?"

"I didn't." He then laughed. "Have you been following us for that reason? And here we were worried about getting caught." The blindfold had slipped down his face. His water gray eyes, darting back and forth, betrayed his false bravado. He had a hard time believing that Nott performing this service for Voldemort wasn't related to Malfoy's death. One Death Eater operation within the confines of the school was hard to fathom, much less two. It would be too much of a coincidence for Harry to accept if these two weren't involved in the murder. He was about to respond when Daphne, who Harry had momentarily forgot about, walked up and hit him over the head with the one of the splintered cabinet's legs. He looked into her face and noted her satisfied smile while she shrugged, brushing her hair back from her face.

"I've wanted to do that for awhile."

"Fair enough," he said, with as smile of his own. He turned back towards Nott. "I'll ask her to hit you again unless you answer my question. Did you kill Draco Malfoy?"

Nott remained steadfastly silent until it was Crabbe who spoke. His soft voice was still disconcerting to Harry. "I can tell him, Theo."

"Shut up, Crabbe. Draco was right, you really are useless."

Daphne crouched down next to Crabbe, sliding his blindfold down his face. "What do you know, Vincent? We can help you get out of this if you're cooperative with us now."

Crabbe started to speak over Nott's protestations, Daphne and Harry both listening intently to him as he started to relate a story of Malfoy disappearing for a stretch over the summer before coming back to school full of anger and spite, wildly swinging back and forth between euphoria and deep depression. Not seeing Malfoy over the summer was not entirely unusual, as the Malfoys were often occupied with a variety of societal obligations, travel plans, and in recent years with the Dark Lord's requests, but he grew suspicious when Malfoy refused to say where he was or why he had not even written. Harry didn't really care about the background and tried to spur Crabbe onward at a pace faster than he was going, failing to do so, as Crabbe said it was all very important. Daphne threatened to stun him after he did this a third time and he fell silent, letting Crabbe talk. Listening to his story, Harry couldn't help thinking how much they neglected to learn about their classmates, as they would have saved a lot of trouble just asking Crabbe about what happened.

It was when Crabbe began relating a conversation between Malfoy, Goyle, Nott, and himself, all the children of Death Eaters in Slytherin, where Malfoy was telling them all the Dark Lord had put something inside of him, when a loud crunching sound behind them drew their attention away. In their haste to learn what Crabbe knew they forgot about Nott, who was now rolling around on the floor in obvious pain. There were glass shards scattered around him and a dense fog was emanating from a spot in his robes. Something was obvious wrong. The fog was making his eyes burn and throat close, and based on the chorus of coughs and wheezing around him it was having a similar impact on his compatriots. He started seeing spots in his vision and fell to all fours, every breath followed by a sharp pain of agony in his rib cage. Cursing himself for not thinking to check if Nott had anything else hidden away after his first stunt, he tried to drag himself away from Nott's now unmoving body. Daphne had collapsed and Crabbe was now rolling around on the floor as well. His thoughts were clouded and his limbs were weak, each breath shallower than the last. A fleeting thought crossed his mind and he prepared to pass into the blissful abyss: this was how he was going to die.

In the distance, or what his poison addled brain assumed was the distance, he heard what sounded like more glass breaking. Each breath was lighter, each thought clearer than the last. As his vision returned to him he saw a bright white cloud coming from Crabbe's robes. He must have had an antidote to whatever Nott was carrying with him. Daphne slapped Nott a few times, knocking him out of his unconscious state and forcing him to take a breath. Another moment or two and he probably would have escaped into the netherworld.

Crabbe smiled ruefully. "That's not the first time that happened. He insisted we start carrying this after Draco died in case somebody tried to come after us. Idiot dropped it the second time. He never told me exactly what it was, but make sure you get a few big breaths of the antidote so you completely neutralize the poison."

Nott groaned and spoke, slurring his speech slightly, "You're a traitor, Crabbe."

"No, Theodore, I'm not. You betrayed your friends when you agreed to do his job for him. You were condemning Draco to worse than death."

"At least I didn't actually kill him."

Harry whirled in surprise, staring directly at Crabbe. Crabbe met his gaze and nodded sadly, a tear trickling down his cheek. Daphne stepped over and kneeled next to Crabbe, placing a hand on his arm.

"Is that true, Vincent?"

He nodded. "He was in so much pain, Daph. I couldn't watch him struggle anymore. And when he," he said, nodding his head in Nott's direction, "agreed to fix the cabinet for the Dark Lord, he was essentially condemning Draco to a life of imprisonment. In one of his moments of lucidity, we decided it would be for the best."

Harry ignored Crabbe when he said 'Lord'. They could deal with his loyalties later. He crouched down next to Crabbe, bewildered. "What do you mean, 'brief moments of lucidity'?" he asked. "Malfoy seemed fine to me."

"That's because you only saw him in public. The Dark Lord did something to him over the summer that caused him to become more and more unstable. In private, he was different. He volleyed between his normal self and deranged, and his personality was much colder and vindictive then it had ever been. Remember when he went after those first years?" he said, addressing Daphne.

Daphne nodded. "That was ruthless, even for Malfoy."

She shook her head at Harry when he opened his mouth to ask what happened. Crabbe was really talking now and she didn't want to interrupt his flow. Harry could wait. Whatever he did wasn't good.

"Even I'll admit Draco wasn't the greatest person, but he was a good friend of mine and not nearly as cruel as you Gryffindors wanted to believe. When Theo agreed to fix the cabinet, Draco would no longer be useful at Hogwarts and the Dark Lord was going to lock him away to keep him safe. I didn't want to let that happen."

"How did you do it, Vincent?" asked Daphne, her eyes filled with tears. Harry was conflicted. It was a lot easier to blame this all on Nott, a ruthless upstart trying to gain favor with his lord, then it was to put it on Crabbe, who by all accounts, was a loyal friend delivering a final act of mercy.

He took a deep breath. "Poison. I poisoned him. Draco's father had given him a vial of poison in case of capture."

"Why did you do it in the Great Hall, of all places?" asked Harry.

"It would have been too obvious how it was done otherwise. The poison is untraceable, but Snape would have probably guessed what it was if Draco had done it alone. He was the one who brewed it for distribution to the Death Eaters. We assumed that if we did it during dinner maybe it would be pinned on one of the elves as a way of striking at the Dark Lord. Or at least couldn't be simply dismissed as a suicide or power struggle."

Unlikely. The elves would mostly likely be sworn to protect the castle and those who reside inside of it so it would be impossible for one of them to deliberately poison a student. For a group of children raised to disrespect house elves and diminish their abilities, it was probably an easy leap for them to make.

"Why did you do have to do it, Vincent?"

"Draco couldn't do it. Whatever it was the Dark Lord had done to him it prevented him from harming himself. He gave me the poison a few weeks before I used it. By doing it this way, he wouldn't know when the poison was being used and couldn't do anything to avoid it. I held onto it for a few weeks, working up the courage to do it."

He continued in this vein, relating how Malfoy's moments of being himself grew increasingly shorter and fewer and farther in between. The pain this transformation was causing him. The increasing cruelty in which he interacted with housemates. In the last week, he finally started to show signs of deterioration in public, earning detentions from McGonagall and Sprout and drawing Dumbledore's attention. The night before his death after a particularly long and arduous detention from the Transfiguration professor, Malfoy had asked for the poison back from Crabbe, refusing to say why.

"That's when I knew it was time to act. Malfoy was never great at potions, so I gave him a vial of water hoping to buy enough time. That next evening, before dinner, I slipped the poison up my sleeve. I stole his wand when he wasn't looking and slipped a drop on his food. He was dead within the minute."

"Why'd you take his wand?" asked Daphne, "it seems like a big risk that he wouldn't notice that."

"He did," Crabbe breathed deeply. "He reached for his wand when the poison took hold and noticed it missing. He looked right at me before he died. I'll never forget that cold blank stare, but I like to believe I saw a glimmer of the old Draco there as he took his last breath. The wand had my fingerprints all over it so I cast it into the Forbidden Forest, back where we used to play in our first and second years."  
"And what about whatever Voldemort had done to Malfoy?" asked Harry, despite the gravity of the situation, savoring the way the name made Nott and Crabbe flinch.

He shrugged. "Whatever it was wasn't worth the pain and suffering he was going through. Lucius and Narcissa would never go directly against our lord but I knew they were looking for a way out for him too. Draco couldn't handle it anymore. He was so close to cracking for so long, it took immense strength to hold it together but I could tell he was losing," his voice thick, eyes downcast. "He was so erratic those last few weeks it was only a matter of time before he did irreversible harm to someone and fell back into the Dark Lord's hands."

Nott broke his silence, his voice angry. "Then you should have let him!"

Crabbe tilted his body in the other Slytherin's direction. "You didn't care about Draco. I could tell you were more than happy to push him out of the way when the Dark Lord determined he was incapable of finishing this work. Strutting around the Common Room, like you owned the place because the Dark Lord offered you up as a sacrificial lamb."

"The Dark Lord rewarded me with this challenge! He saw how Malfoy cracked under pressure and knew it was time to let a new family come to favor. I would have been successful too if it hadn't been for Potter."

"Challenge?" Daphne asked.

"The cabinets," Nott said, gesturing at the battered piece of furniture. "We were going to use them to get Death Eaters in the school. Based on Mulciber's presence," he said, gesturing at him. "It was successful."

Harry laughed. "Reward? More like punishment. I think he was just looking for an excuse to kill you, Nott. Or have the Ministry do it for him."

Nott was about to retort when the door burst open behind them. Ron, Hermione, and the headmaster, looking as he did the night he fought Voldemort at the Ministry, eyes blazing and mouth set in a hard line, came into the room wands drawn, prepared for a fight. They lowered them as they took in the scene in front of them. Splintered wood, Daphne covered in bruises, a bound Nott and Crabbe laying in the middle of the room.

Dumbledore's eyes swept the area. Torches had fallen out of their sconces and were scattered about the room, along with the pieces of the cabinet. Mulciber lay against the wall, his body still propped at the odd angle Harry had left it. Crabbe was off to the side, not breaking his stare at Nott's body while Daphne and Harry stood over him, still holding their wands tight to his form. Ron and Hermione still stood in the threshold, not even entering the room. Dumbledore walked over to Mulciber and pressed his fingers against his throat, shaking his head. He conjured a large sheet and levitated it over him. Locking eyes with Harry, he nodded his head. Harry shrugged. It was too late to take back his actions and too soon for regret.

* * *

 **A/N:** There you have it. When I started writing this story, I didn't know who would be the one to actually kill Malfoy. I was probably halfway in before I settled on some final choices and even then ended up writing two different versions of the last third of the story. I decided Crabbe's motivations fit the story best. Let me know what you think! There will be one more short chapter to tie everything up but I hope you've enjoyed reading the story as much as I did writing it.


	9. IX

**IX**

"What do you think Dumbledore will have to say to you, Harry?" asked Hermione, sipping a mug of tea as they finished up a late breakfast in the Great Hall on the Saturday, a few days following the arrest of Theodore Nott and Vincent Crabbe. He had only spoken Dumbledore briefly since then, that same night after he questioned the two of them to his satisfaction before handing them over to Ministry custody.

There had been little update in the interim. Nott was likely to face Azkaban but Crabbe's fate was uncertain. He had murdered a fellow student, that was undeniable, indeed he readily admitted to it. He had also done his best to help Death Eaters to infiltrate Hogwarts, and reluctant or no, that gave one pause before releasing him back into the school. Dumbledore likely wanted him back under his guidance, perhaps hoping to give him a chance to avenge his friend working against Lord Voldemort, but that seemed like a longshot at best. The Ministry wanted to show the public they were doing something about the war and Harry doubted many wizarding families would be happy to see a known murderer, regardless of the altruism of the act, freely walking the castle. That may not be up to them, he thought, as the more time Crabbe spent outside of Hogwarts the greater chance of him ending up dead.

"No idea. Not sure how much more there is to say about Nott and Malfoy, so maybe we'll get back to our regular lessons. Voldemort isn't going anywhere after all."

Left unsaid was the fact he was growing bolder if he felt confident enough to enlist a Hogwarts student to attempt to smuggle Death Eaters into the school under Dumbledore's nose using an obscure magical artifact. Losing the children of two prominent servants would only increase the intensity of the war, not bring it down. It was time to bring this to an end. What happened to Malfoy should never have to happen to another student, child of a Death Eater or not. He could agree with Dumbledore about that.

"I wonder what You-Know-Who...V-Voldemort..." Ron amended, noticing Harry's look. "Did to Malfoy? It must have been pretty bad to make Malfoy want to give himself up like that."

"Not sure. Maybe Dumbledore will know."

Hermione interjected. "Whatever it is, it must be beyond anything we can comprehend. Altering a person in that way, within their being while leaving the rest of them intact, is one of the darkest and most dangerous things you can do. The inherent instability of magic means even if you do everything perfectly it will probably fail after a time. Maybe it was some sort of experiment gone wrong? I wonder what it could be…"

"Could it be something as simple as the Imperius Curse?" Harry offered half-heartedly, knowing it was unlikely a caster as proficient as Voldemort would produce such a tenuous an unstable application of the curse.

"Mmmhmm," she responded, not really listening. Gazing off into the distance, absentmindedly tapping her cheek he could tell her mind was already running off in a hundred different directions. A trip to the library was likely in short order. Harry didn't like the look on her face. Hermione's boundless curiosity was an amazing aspect of her personality and a boon to herself and those around her, but looking at her while she contemplated the magic Voldemort could have performed on Malfoy made him uneasy. Ron too, apparently.

"Um, Hermione?" Ron said, waving his hand in front of her face. "What are you thinking about?"

"Oh, nothing," she said, without meeting their eyes. "By the way," she asked, facing him again. "How did you manage to get into the Room of Requirement? Ron and I must have walked back and forth for ten minutes asking it to open in various ways and it wouldn't budge. Even Dumbledore struggled for a few minutes before using a complex enchantment to push into the room."

"I had to ask the room to give me a place to help Voldemort," he said, somewhat embarrassed. He felt uncomfortable saying it outloud even if it was only a lie.

"That must have been weird," Ron said, picking up another scone. "How did you figure that one out? Doesn't seem like asking to help You-Know-Who is something that would occur to you naturally."

"Actually…"

"That would have been me," said a voice from behind Harry. He turned and took in the sight of the tall blonde standing at the end of the Gryffindor table, fully recovered from her ordeal. Harry had gotten off quite easy compared to her. Her exposure to Nott's poison had been much more acute and she somehow managed to collect more cuts and bruises than Harry, a rarity for those accompanying him.

"...it was Daphne," he finished with a shrug. "She's spent a lot more time around Slytherins than I have."

"Unfortunately. Can I have a word with you, Harry?" she asked.

"Sure," he said, standing up from the table. "I'll catch up with you guys later today?"

Ron and Hermione nodded, their lack of suspicion a welcome reaction. They would need everyone to take down Voldemort now and it wouldn't due for Ron and Hermione to go after the only Slytherin they currently had a working relationship with. The two of them steadfastly ignored the eyes in the Great Hall that had turned to watch their impromptu interaction.

"Outside?" he asked and Daphne nodded. They made their way outside in silence, cold air enveloping their bodies, neither of them dressed for the chill of the late autumn day. The last of the leaves were falling and the grass was brown and dry beneath their feet. They were walking towards the spot on the far side of the lake where they had first reached their understanding nearly a month ago. The air was warm then. Harry wasn't quite sure why she wanted to speak with him. They had successfully cleared her father's name and couldn't imagine what else they would have to talk about. Overlooking the lake, they stood in silence for a few moments before Daphne spoke.

"Can I have my necklace back, Harry?"

He pulled the fine silver chain from his pocket, holding it up in the sun and letting the light illuminate the stone, transforming the dark emerald into a twinkling green star. He handed it over to her reluctantly. Truth be told, since she had given it to him weeks ago it rarely left his pocket. Not only because on his person was the safest place for it but because it had become a talisman of sorts. He let the small links slide through his fingers into her outstretched hand. She had helped them bring Malfoy's killer to justice and, as a bonus, stopped a contingent of Death Eaters from infiltrating the school. Mission accomplished.

He smiled at her. "I've been meaning to get that back to you. You haven't been around much this week."

She laughed, slipping the necklace around her neck and doing the clasp in a quick, practiced motion. "I'm sure you have plenty of experience with how serious Madam Pomfrey takes recovery."

They looked at each other awkwardly for a minutes and then averted their gaze. "Um, so what did you want to talk about?"

She pulled her gaze from the lake, looking straight at him. Her voice had none of the discomfort Harry felt. "I wanted to thank you, Harry. My father owled me this morning. The Ministry has agreed that he was not responsible for it."

"The Ministry? I thought it was the Death Eaters who were after your father."

"Malfoy. He still has friends in high places. My father and he have never gotten along, especially since he told them Draco and I were never to be married," she laughed bitterly. "My father suspects he was using his son's death to push the Ministry to get him out of the way. Never one to miss an opportunity, Lucius Malfoy."

"Arranged marriages?"

"Don't you have them in the Muggle world still?"

"Sort of.."

"Anyway. I didn't really have much to say to you other thank you for your help. Not many wizards would have risen to the occasion like you did, much less those from some sort of rival faction. I assume you have to fight the Dark Lord now?"

He absentmindedly throw a pebble out into the lake. "Yeah. I suppose I do."

"Excellent," she said, a small smile on her pale face. "It seems like you're always getting yourself into trouble of some sort or another and after what we went through with Nott, I think I'm ready for a bit of trouble myself."

He smiled, looking out onto the lake. "The other Slytherins won't give you much trouble?"

She waved her hand. "No. With the Notts and Malfoy gone that pretty much takes care of the Death Eater faction of our house." He was surprised to hear that and that surprise must have shown on his face, because she continued. "Slytherins don't tie themselves to a sinking ship, Potter. And if the Dark Lord is anything it's a sinking ship. His supporters were always just the most vocal. Insecurity, I suspect. Bulstrode and I will have Slytherin at your back when the time comes.

"Bulstrode?"

"Both her parents are Ravenclaws and it shows. I think the only reason she was placed in Slytherin was because she wanted to prove wrong all the people who doubted and discouraged her throughout her life."

He reached out his hand and she took it, grasping it firmly. If Harry had thought six weeks ago that Malfoy's murder would have led to a solidifying of the opposition to Lord Voldemort Ron would have said he was crazy, but here he was, shaking hands with Daphne Greengrass, allying himself with a group of people he was ostensibly at odds with since he was eleven. Next thing he knew he'd be getting a letter from Dudley inviting him to his birthday party.

"Glad to have you on board."

She smiled the fullest he had ever seen, her face lighting up it hadn't in any of their other meetings to date. A small part of him wondered if this was the beginning of a new era for Hogwarts, the wizarding world finally brought together by a malevolent force trying its best to tear it down. The more realistic part of him saw it as a marriage of convenience, but figuring that out was for later. They had a war to win first.

"You're a more interesting person than I thought possible, Harry Potter." she said, turning to leave. "I need to get back to the dungeons, but maybe I'll see you around?"

Harry nodded to her, "I'd like that."

He watched her leave, her cloak billowing in the wind. As much as Harry had disliked him, he was happy to have brought Malfoy justice. He had brought the school nothing but negativity in his five plus years there and in the end, not even his unrelenting support for the Dark Lord or the family wealth he counted on to insulate him from the resentment and scorn of the student body, was able to save him. Malfoy had put his faith in the wealth and influence of others and it failed him, leaving behind no one to mourn his passing.

Harry, Daphne, and the rest of the student body would be different. They would work together in the coming weeks and months and stand together when the time came. He picked up an orange leaf and allowed the wind to carry it over his fingers and onto the water. The more people working together, the better. It had taken a murder to bring the Slytherins and the Gryffindors together and, as he turned and watched her slim form one last time, growing smaller in the distance before being swallowed up by the castle, he was confident they would prevail.

* * *

"I'm glad you could join me tonight, Harry," Dumbledore said, his usual benign smile affixed to his face as he looked across the desk at Harry. "We have much to discuss."

Harry's frustrating with Dumbledore was running high as he the headmaster had let nearly a week go by without updating him as to recent developments with Crabbe and Nott. The Prophet had been surprisingly silent as well, leaving them in the dark.

"What has the Ministry done with them?" Harry asked, not letting the headmaster steer the conversation.

"No time for pleasantries, Mr. Potter?" The headmaster chuckled. "To business then! Theodore Nott is in Azkaban awaiting trial alongside his younger brother. Vincent Crabbe is in a Ministry holding cell for the time being and will face further interrogation before the Ministry decides what to do with him. I cannot blame the Ministry for their indecision. It's a very unique case."

It was about what Harry expected. Theodore Nott locked away for a plot to directly attack Hogwarts. His younger brother also facing serious punishment for his ancillary role in it because the Ministry wanted to be seen being tough on Death Eater activity. Crabbe stuck in limbo because while he was helping Nott, he also killed Malfoy, who was working towards the same goal. Harry was planning on asking a follow up question about when the date of the trial was before Dumbledore held up his hand.

"I do not have much more information beyond that for you, Harry. The Ministry does not share all of its plans with me, especially these days," he said, a frown momentarily crossing his features before his brow relaxed again. "No, what I wish to discuss is to what ends Lord Voldemort was using Hogwarts students to achieve his goals. I believe Mr. Nott mentioned it to you?"

Harry thought for a second. He had never exactly spelled out any plan of Voldemort's while he was blindfolded and tied up, though there were the cabinets.

"I assume he was using whatever those cabinets were to smuggle Death Eaters into the school?"

"He was indeed. A mildly ingenious scheme if I do say so myself. It would appear that I do not in fact have the knowledge of every magical artifact in this country. Something I'm sure the Death Eaters are quite happy about. But that is not what I was referring to. Did Messers Nott or Crabben mention anything about what else Lord Voldemort may have done in the recent past?"

Harry thought for a second. The poison seemed to be only for Nott and Crabbe's protection while they were fixing the cabinets. Killing Malfoy wasn't one of Voldemort's ideas, Crabbe had taken that upon himself. That was to put an end to Malfoy's suffering from something the Dark Lord had performed on him.

"Crabbe said he killed Malfoy to save him from whatever Voldemort had done to him over the summer. Voldemort had performed some kind of enchantment on Malfoy or was forcing him to carry something that was causing him pain and making him lose his mind. I doubt that that Voldemort intended for that to happen to Malfoy?"

"I believe that safe to assume, Harry," Dumbledore said, a sad look on his face. His blue eyes were as dull as Harry could recall them being, no hint of their usual twinkle. "Lord Voldemort likely did not intend to do that. I believe Voldemort's plan was to use Draco Malfoy for something very few wizards have ever heard of, much less attempted, and almost none have succeeded at doing."

"What is that, sir?"

"They are one of the darkest inventions of wizardkind, one which is deeply disturbing and darkly evil, even for the standards we apply to many of Lord Voldemort's actions. They are something I have suspected Tom Riddle of for a long time but hoped he did not pursue. Tonight, we will discuss Horcruxes…"

 **A/N:** There you have it. Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed the story, I might have something new coming along at some point in the not to distant future. This story was originally conceived as more of a HP/DG romance then it ended up being (if you squint, you can probably see some elements alluding to that in the early part of the story) so I've still got some ideas kicking around for a more romance-centric fic. In the meanwhile, cheers!


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